Writing Quandary
So whatever Meg had, I have. Perhaps I should be thankful this struck the very day after my long Wednesday. I'm nauseated, dizzy, sickened by the thought of eating, and I've actually experienced minor visual hallucinations. I thought it was just me flipping out, but then Meg said that she had seen them too. Little black bugs in the periphery of my vision. So there's that.
I have a question for those of you who write, or read a lot, or who are just interested in art and literature and what-not. I'd appreciate some responses.
A creative writing teacher in high school, no doubt exhausted by the countless stories he had received involving vampires, complained about fantasy and science fiction. And though, even at the time, I was an avid appreciator of scifi, I understood what he was saying. I remain devoted to the genre, and I've branched back into fantasy, which I enjoyed in my youth and largely abandoned in my adolescence, but I am also a very critical reader. For me, scifi and fantasy ought not be reduced to window dressing. Putting rockets in a love story does not make it a science fiction story. A world in which magic is essentially the same as gunpowder is, likewise, no fantasy. It may be the best story in the world, but it will remain, to this reader, disconnected from its setting. There's a healthy gray area, sure, but we've all seen works in which the fantastic or technological elements were mere marketing. One could have set the story in a contemporary setting and lost nothing.
That said, I have a new story and I'm not sure if it violates my rules. It involves elves, and that's about all that I need to say. Elves--and I am trying to describe them in terms not utterly beholden to Tolkien or role-playing games and am therefore going back to some of the Norse stories--are the story's central focus, and I'm wondering if that doesn't essentially make the story about humans with pointy ears.
I'm not really wondering about if it's a contemporary story. It's not, and that's intentional, because I am so utterly convinced of the way of the world that, for my fiction-writing, I have to go find another world. But I'm wondering if, instead of magical creation, I might as well invent new technology. When is a story a fantasy and when is it science fiction? Why set a story deep under the earth following a magical assault when, instead, I can feature a group of characters struggling to survive in the depths of space?
I'm trying to figure out what of the setting is essential to the story, and the wall that stands in my way is a question, the answer to which I'm not really sure of. For me, fantasy is rooted in the past, in what could have been, in the histories that we weren't able to remember. It can explain in the way of a creation myth or a just-so story. On the other hand, science fiction can offer a glimpse of a future that we're not ready to enter (either one that we would hope to get to, or one that we hope we never earn). It tells us what might happen, given certain assessments of contemporary nature, extrapolated into the future and given wildly divergent conditions.
So why should I deal with magical manipulation of life and not, say, genetic engineering? If the story is the same--beings reacting to ostracism and newfound powers--then is setting irrelevant? Or am I missing something more essential to either fantasy or scifi, some demand that is made of any work that would carry the label?
I have a question for those of you who write, or read a lot, or who are just interested in art and literature and what-not. I'd appreciate some responses.
A creative writing teacher in high school, no doubt exhausted by the countless stories he had received involving vampires, complained about fantasy and science fiction. And though, even at the time, I was an avid appreciator of scifi, I understood what he was saying. I remain devoted to the genre, and I've branched back into fantasy, which I enjoyed in my youth and largely abandoned in my adolescence, but I am also a very critical reader. For me, scifi and fantasy ought not be reduced to window dressing. Putting rockets in a love story does not make it a science fiction story. A world in which magic is essentially the same as gunpowder is, likewise, no fantasy. It may be the best story in the world, but it will remain, to this reader, disconnected from its setting. There's a healthy gray area, sure, but we've all seen works in which the fantastic or technological elements were mere marketing. One could have set the story in a contemporary setting and lost nothing.
That said, I have a new story and I'm not sure if it violates my rules. It involves elves, and that's about all that I need to say. Elves--and I am trying to describe them in terms not utterly beholden to Tolkien or role-playing games and am therefore going back to some of the Norse stories--are the story's central focus, and I'm wondering if that doesn't essentially make the story about humans with pointy ears.
I'm not really wondering about if it's a contemporary story. It's not, and that's intentional, because I am so utterly convinced of the way of the world that, for my fiction-writing, I have to go find another world. But I'm wondering if, instead of magical creation, I might as well invent new technology. When is a story a fantasy and when is it science fiction? Why set a story deep under the earth following a magical assault when, instead, I can feature a group of characters struggling to survive in the depths of space?
I'm trying to figure out what of the setting is essential to the story, and the wall that stands in my way is a question, the answer to which I'm not really sure of. For me, fantasy is rooted in the past, in what could have been, in the histories that we weren't able to remember. It can explain in the way of a creation myth or a just-so story. On the other hand, science fiction can offer a glimpse of a future that we're not ready to enter (either one that we would hope to get to, or one that we hope we never earn). It tells us what might happen, given certain assessments of contemporary nature, extrapolated into the future and given wildly divergent conditions.
So why should I deal with magical manipulation of life and not, say, genetic engineering? If the story is the same--beings reacting to ostracism and newfound powers--then is setting irrelevant? Or am I missing something more essential to either fantasy or scifi, some demand that is made of any work that would carry the label?