Book VS. Book (or cathartic venting)
I just finished The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and it totally rocked. It was funny to encounter the structure of the book being set on one thing I know pretty well (fantasy/science fiction books, comic books, etc.) and one I did not have much of a clue on (the history of the Dominican Republic and it's peoples suffering under Trujillo), but it all blends together into something very new and very old at the same time. The mult-generational family saga is an often told story but in such an irresistible, outrageous voice, filled with multi-lingual, pop culture refernces and f-bombs! It was genuinely thrilling to read, like I was at a great punk concert in literary form. It gave me ideas to ponder on my Shimmer novel too.
Also have beeen reading (from blog link to blog link) many articles on plot's resurgence in fiction. Apparently there was a dying gasp of plot in fiction in the '80's to early '90's in literary fiction as style over trampled-unless you were writing genre fiction? Now with the multitude of so-called literary writers (Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Don Delilo, Thomas Pynchon) pulling from science fiction, comic books, noir, apocalyptic science fiction for their own novels (with varying levels of respect towards their genre sources), there is an interesting idea that this melding of genres is one of the large factors of plot's rebirth.
I've said it before-reading "literary fiction"-what I term novels/stories soley focused on the real world as it is, in prose that's more than meat and potatoes-for the first time (mostly) in college oddly twisted me up. Foolishly thought there wasn't something as good about the fantasy/science fiction I wanted to write, and struggled briefly to get my head to think about only realistic stories. Then figured out, while I may enjoy reading both styles of stories (Eudora Welty, Jayne Anne Phillips, Alice Munro, Pal Yoon-rock!), I am bored to tears trying to write a completely realistic story-I need SOMETHING unreal, fantastical, magic-realist, whatever-in it (a little or alot.) And then I discovered authors that did such things (Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Kelly Link, Michael Chabon, Jeff Vandermeer, Junot Diaz, Haruki Murakami, Alexander Chee, Chris Adrian, Anne Carson) to numerous degrees, and who usually weren't scornful of those non-realistic roots. Yay! And I've found myself going back to my roots, reading Julian May, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Gene Wolfe currently-brilliant writers who are fully fantastical.
Although my current novel still is a bloody mess, with a push and tug of real and unreal elements, I like that it's a bloody mess. More a matter of not knowing exactly what story I want to tell yet, as opposed to feeling forced towards one style or another.
Also have beeen reading (from blog link to blog link) many articles on plot's resurgence in fiction. Apparently there was a dying gasp of plot in fiction in the '80's to early '90's in literary fiction as style over trampled-unless you were writing genre fiction? Now with the multitude of so-called literary writers (Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Don Delilo, Thomas Pynchon) pulling from science fiction, comic books, noir, apocalyptic science fiction for their own novels (with varying levels of respect towards their genre sources), there is an interesting idea that this melding of genres is one of the large factors of plot's rebirth.
I've said it before-reading "literary fiction"-what I term novels/stories soley focused on the real world as it is, in prose that's more than meat and potatoes-for the first time (mostly) in college oddly twisted me up. Foolishly thought there wasn't something as good about the fantasy/science fiction I wanted to write, and struggled briefly to get my head to think about only realistic stories. Then figured out, while I may enjoy reading both styles of stories (Eudora Welty, Jayne Anne Phillips, Alice Munro, Pal Yoon-rock!), I am bored to tears trying to write a completely realistic story-I need SOMETHING unreal, fantastical, magic-realist, whatever-in it (a little or alot.) And then I discovered authors that did such things (Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Kelly Link, Michael Chabon, Jeff Vandermeer, Junot Diaz, Haruki Murakami, Alexander Chee, Chris Adrian, Anne Carson) to numerous degrees, and who usually weren't scornful of those non-realistic roots. Yay! And I've found myself going back to my roots, reading Julian May, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Gene Wolfe currently-brilliant writers who are fully fantastical.
Although my current novel still is a bloody mess, with a push and tug of real and unreal elements, I like that it's a bloody mess. More a matter of not knowing exactly what story I want to tell yet, as opposed to feeling forced towards one style or another.