True Confessions and a Continuation of the Bloodletting

Of course there are a million “true” ways to write. I have always been an advocate of the “anything works as long as it gets words on the page” method. Approaching a story via idea or via character doesn’t make a lick of difference as long as the writer writes.

That being said, I think that both Kelly and I would agree that the average reader tends to identify with character first and foremost. I think we also agree that a good story operates on all sorts of levels. If that story is a genre story, then setting (ie the SF bits) are (or ought) to be key to the telling of the tale.

Admittedly, it’s that last bit of this concept that has caused me a touch of panic. One of the things that I took away from the original discussion on Jay’s post is the question of when is genre necessary to a story. That might not have been his point (in fact, I’m quite sure I read that into it), but that idea sparked a strong and probably somewhat irrational response from me for a couple of different reasons. The first, I already attempted to talk about, which is that I have found myself having to defend the point of science fiction to a lot of mainstream people. (I think I've said what I want to about that, though I don't know that I was necessarily very clear about entertainment vs. message, since a lot of people seemed to have misread me.)

BUT the second, more confessional reaction is that I am one of those writers who has often been accused by colleagues and reviewers alike of writing stories in which the SF/F/H elements are secondary to the main theme. In other words, I’ve heard a lot of people say about the things that I have written that they could just have easily have been written in contemporary settings or otherwise outside of the trappings of genre. So, when trying to articulate why genre is important to me my own personal buttons got pushed – harder, I think than even I realized because, speaking of being pushed, I was quite forcibly retired from the science fiction community by my editors.

I’m not writing this to say woe is me. I’ll be back. But, I think that one of the reasons I hit this so hard is because it’s an issue I struggle with on a daily basis -- which is: what is the point of writing? Why write genre? What is it about SF that makes it the genre I most want to express myself in?

I'm not going to try to answer those questions right now, because I don't know that they're all entirely germaine to the discussion at hand. However, for me, one of the reasons I write (and read) has always been to learn something. I don’t mean this as something lofty necessarily. Books like Janet Evonavich’s ONE FOR THE MONEY taught me something about being a bounty hunter, for instance. (It might not be accurate, but it felt real and that worked for me.) I also learned something about what Janet thinks New Jersey women and Italian men are like. So every time I enter into a story it’s to look for these sorts of things – call them what you will (truths? Pieces of one’s self?) When I write, I do give away little bits of myself in the details. This is another thing that I jumped in to defend, because it’s something that I like about reading… that glimpse into someone else’s house, someone else’s mind. Because I don’t think you can write without giving a little bit of yourself away.

Maybe this is an issue that Kelly (or others) will take issue with, but I think that it’s at the core of this discussion about “bloodletting.” I do think that writers bleed on to the page a little every time we sit down to write (regardless of whether we get there via character or idea). That’s why writing is such a personal endeavor. That’s why rejections hurt.

I also think that’s okay… even laudable. To bleed, I mean.