Before I go any further, I think it is time for me to admit that I don’t necessarily know what I’m talking about. Or perhaps more accurately, I will observe that the writing of fiction is an art form and thus is ruled by taste.
Our world is made up of things that are absolute and things that are relative. If you jump out of an airplane (not something I’d personally recommend), your fall will accelerate at a rate of 32 feet per second per second. The radius of every circle is πr2. These are undeniable truths, but the arts are different. They have as many answers as opinions. Of course, writing follows certain rules. We have grammar rules… which can be broken. We have scene and sequence structures… which can be ignored. A staggering number of books across all genres contain aspects of the “Hero’s Journey”… but this archetype need not be followed. And, of course, never start a sentence with ‘and.’ Oops.
The point here is that, since writing is an art form, there are many ways to write it well. Likewise, there are many ways to do it badly. But what makes writing good or bad? As a human being who reads, I certainly have my opinions, but that doesn’t mean that what I like everyone else will, too. I suspect we all had to read books in school that we didn’t care for. We read them because someone declared them ‘classics’ or ‘important.’ Perhaps these appellations were deserved, but I sometimes had my doubts. Regardless, we all have our own examples of great stories and awful ones.
Part of it comes down to tolerances. How much are you willing to put up with something you don’t care for in order to enjoy something you like? You may be willing to endure sloppy prose because you love the story. Or elegant prose may pull you through a mediocre tale. I recently conducted a project where I read the first fifty pages of ten contemporary fantasy novels and I marveled at the variety available. The books I chose were all set in alternate worlds, involved magic, and were placed in settings that were technologically and sociologically akin to the Middle Ages. In other words, core fantasy genre material. Yet the stories that were told and the ways they were recounted were incredibly diverse.
As hinted at above, one aspect I noticed was prose. There were books with writing so smooth it felt like I was living the story more than reading it. Other books had such elaborate prose that the language called attention to itself. There was no way I could forget I was reading because the text summoned me to marvel at it. And then there were books where the prose was visceral, raw, and sometimes rough. We each have our preferences and our tolerances for these style choices.
But prose is just the tip of the iceberg. I could just as easily talk about levels of tension, suspense, and peril. I could mention character. Then there is the matter of how much a story embraces the bounds of the familiar or pushes past them. Familiarity possesses power. How many books include dwarves, elves, and goblins or races that reasonably could be equated to them? Do people get tired of these stories? Some, certainly, but the very pervasiveness of these race-types proves how popular the classic themes can be. Other stories push boldly into new places, introducing races that are completely alien to our experiences. Some people love discovering new weird things, while for others, the strangeness is too bizarre for them to relate to.
Going back to my 50-page experience above, I found some fantastic books while others I was glad to put down. One of them I had to finish, so I paused my experiment to do just that. Several more I plan to complete as I have time. But I abandoned one of them before my fifty-page goal because I’d had enough. Here’s the thing, though. Every one of these books was from a well-known author with a large fan base. In other words, how can I say that the ones I didn’t care for had done something wrong? Their success is proof against that claim.
I’m not going to list the books I didn’t care for. I know that each of those authors poured their hearts into their work. Writing is a vulnerable activity where a measure of your soul is written out on the pages and I don’t want to be any part of damaging that. It’s okay that I didn’t care for their stories. Who knows, they may not care for mine either and that’s just as fine.
To bridge this back to the title of this piece, my articles and my stories will, of course, conform to what I enjoy. But that doesn’t mean that other models aren’t worthy of respect. Where possible, and insofar as I understand them, I’ll try to give them their due. In future articles, I plan to talk about my journey along the writing path and lessons I’ve learned along the way. Occasionally, I’ll make observations on the fantasy genre as a whole. From time to time I’ll include snippets of lore from my own world of Isfalinis. On the latter topic, I can claim to be the singular expert, but as for the rest, I can only speak as one fan of the fantasy genre to another.