Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 40

Grimdark and Noir

I asked the following question on facebook:

Do women write grimdark fantasy? Do women read it?

One of my facebook colleagues asked me what I meant by grimdark. I wrote:

You know, I'm not sure. I call the Blade series that Kelly McCullough is writing "noir fantasy." I think "grimdark" is related. I guess I'm thinking of George Martin's series, Patrick Rothfuss... I read Kelly's books, but I haven't read Martin or Rothfuss... I think I would include Doug Hulick in "noir."

The colleague then told me (and he really knows science fiction and fantasy) that Martin and Rothfuss are not considered grimdark. Martin is epic or heroic fantasy.

I replied:

Okay. I don't know what grimdark is, then. Maybe I should stick to "noir fantasy," since I sort of know what it is. I like noir. I grew up on Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. But I find it interesting (and surprising) to read fantasy that is dark and gritty and reminds me of Chandler...

I did the obvious thing and Googled grimdark. It comes from gaming, specifically the game Warhammer, and has spread. The Cthulhu Mythos and the Dresden Files are described as grimdark in the sites I read. It describes fiction set in a dark, violent, unpleasant environment...

I just came across a forum discussion of the term. Several people discussing said grimdark was over the top grimness and darkness and violence, and that it was an adolescent idea of reality.

Another of my facebook colleagues said she had the impression grimdark was rather too full of misogyny and violence toward women. "Rapey," she called it.

So I'm not sure where this leaves the conversation. I think there's a lot of dark fantasy around: vampire and zombie fiction; other forms of horror; stories from the Cthulhu Mythos, which has oddly reappeared; dark epic fantasy; grimdark, which is over the top grim and dark fantasy; noir fantasy, which I see as a mixture of fantasy and tough guy detective fiction...

Well, we have been at war for twelve years -- an undeclared and illegal war, in which many civilians have been killed, and many American soldiers have come back badly damaged. This must have some effect on the society. And all around the world, we see economies contract, and ordinary people get increasingly poor, while a tiny group of the very rich grab most of the planet's resources. And we know Global Warming is making the planet less habitable.

I guess all of this could produce a dark and grim fiction.

Happy As A Clam

I spent Memorial Day weekend at the Wisconsin Science Fiction Convention (Wiscon) in Madison. As always, it was wonderful. I then spent another four days on a writing retreat in a B&B in Madison with four other people from Wiscon. Also wonderful. But I was glad to get home this past Friday. Sunday morning I woke (in my own bed!) with a poem forming in my mind.

I'm the happiest clam in the ocean.
I'm the happiest clam in the sea.
All of the oysters in all of the bays
Cannot compare to me.

I don't have a pearl to offer.
I don't have a pearl to share.
But here is song to help you along
As you travel from Here to There.

Rude Questions

I got in a facebook discussion about rude questions directed at people of color. "What are you?" "Where are you from?" I wrote:

I grew up in an environment where people asked, "What are you?" The choice was Norwegian-American or Swedish-American in most cases, but people found the answer interesting. ("You are? So am I! What part of Norway does your family come from? Have you been to the homeland yet?") I don't find the question rude, but many people do, so I try to keep myself from asking it. I broke down at Wiscon and asked a guy who was getting a book signed, since I really did not recognize his name at all and had to be very careful when writing it out. So I asked him about it. I could see him freeze a bit, but he told me. It is a culture I have read about and find really interesting, which I told him. I hope he has forgiven me for the question. What difference does national origin make? It's fascinating. The world is full of all these neat different cultures. I'm not a comfortable traveler and I don't have a lot of spare money, so I mostly stay home in Minnesota. But I read about the rest of the world, and when I meet someone who knows about a different culture, who is from the culture or has lived in it, I'm interested.

One of the other people on the thread pointed out that "this was apples and origins." The questions I learned to ask were designed to form bonds or -- at most -- to discover interesting and not very very important differences. (Norwegian vs. Swedish vs. Danish vs. Icelandic.) Directed at non-whites, they become code for "what are you doing here, where you don't belong?"

Another person on the thread (a Canadian) said she couldn't ask a Canadian Person of Color where he or she was from, because the question came out, "you are foreign," even though the intent of the question was to find out which Canadian province the person was from.

As the US becomes increasingly nonwhite, a lot of racism is bubbling up. I think the safest thing for me to assume is that questions about other people's backgrounds have a hostile intent. I need to stop asking them.

The facebook discussion started with the Cherrios ad with the mixed race family. Apparently there are people who freak out when faced with a mixed race family or refuse to believe the family is a family. It's a good idea to assume a unit that looks like a family is a family, even if the members are not identical. Asking people if they are related to their kids is rude.

Writing is Work

This is a comment on a post by the facebook colleague. He spent 40 years working in a bank and writing in his free time. Now, he is free of the bank and able to write full time. People ask him what he's doing. He says writing, and they don't take him seriously. Their response is, "That's nice. Do you think you'd be able to walk my dog, or trim my garden, since you aren't working?"

I don't get that kind of condescension much anymore, because I have not stayed in contract with people who don't understand I'm a writer. But I know this conversation well. I think it comes from several places. People think of work entirely in terms of money, rather than personal satisfaction or social value. If it doesn't pay a living wage, it isn't work. And people have no idea -- none at all -- how writing is done and how publishing works. I tell people I'm a writer and they ask, "Have you published anything?" They think of writing as either (a) Stephen King or (b) a hobby. Since I am obviously not Stephen King, writing must be a hobby for me. No, it is not a hobby. I have organized my entire life around being able to write, even though I've not been able to make a living at it and so have had day jobs -- many day jobs; I get bored and quit. Now I old enough to collect Social Security, and I'm writing full time. It feels good. It's hard work, and it's real work.

Diamond

I just read "A Diamond As Big As The Ritz" by F. Scott Fitzgerald as research for a story I'm writing. I'm sure I've read it before, but not for many years. It's a combination of a tall tale and King Solomon's Mines and chock full of class hatred. If this is any indication Fitzgerald did not like the American rich much at all.

Literary Fiction

Bits of a discussion on facebook:

I am trying to figure out why I am so hostile to post WWII literary fiction. My current theory is it's due to all the periodicals I read as a kid. My parents subscribed to The New Yorker, the Sunday New York Times, The London Times Literary Supplement and -- when it began to be published -- The New York Review of Books. I read them all. (I also read cereal boxes.) I think they gave me lasting negative impression of literary fiction.

My reading in literary fiction is spotty at best. I liked Moo, The Robber Bride, Possession -- though I liked Byatt's collection of short stories The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye better. One of Alice Munro's collections really impressed me, but I can't remember the title. I love Calvino's Invisible Cities and all of Borges.

I love the novels of Paco Ignacio Taibo II, though I am not sure he is literary...

Gary Wolfe told me years ago that you can introduce science fiction to anyone by finding out what kind of mainstream fiction they like. There will always be SF that's similar. The women literary writers I like are like LeGuin. The men write fantasy. Invisible Cities reminds me of Disch's essay on building pyramids in Minnesota...

My prejudice is obviously that -- a prejudice. When I like fiction, I move it out of literary fiction category, so I can continue to dislike literary fiction. I do the same with horror. I don't like horror. When I like something, it is not horror.

I think that I needed to draw certain lines to become the writer I wanted to be. Critics of the immediate postwar era were sexist. Women could not be good writers. I can remember being sad as a high school kid, because I wanted to be a poet, and women were not good poets. At the time, my favorite poet was Emily Dickinson. Why was science fiction a better venue? Maybe because criticism was less important there. And I wanted to write about real things -- police states and the threat of nuclear war.

I'm not defending my attitude toward literary fiction by the way. It might have made some sense when I was a kid, but both SF and the mainstream have changed. I'm trying to think my way out of the prejudice.

A Four Day Visit by my Brother

Sunny day here. Patrick has spent the day napping, due to feeling ill. I am feeling tired. Because my brother is arriving tonight, I am still cleaning. Yesterday Patrick said, "Do you think he will notice dust?" I said, "Of course not. He's not the kind of person who checks the top of picture frames." Then I thought, OMG I haven't dusted the picture frames. So I did it today, but only the ones that were easy to reach.

Years ago, my brother came for a visit. Before he arrived, Patrick said, "You two will have a huge argument about something pointless, and then you'll go to an art museum, and your brother will straighten pictures." So my brother arrived, and we had a huge argument over whether US Senators are paid too much or too little. Then we went to the Walker Art Center. There was a Russian Constructivist show on. My brother looked at a trio of paintings that were not especially good, though maybe of historical importance. He said, "That isn't art, and it isn't even straight." And he straightened the pictures.
*
Patrick drove my brother and me south along the Mississippi. We went through the Prairie Island reservation and looked for the reservation's small herd of bison. They are in a large area with a high fence. This time they were close to the fence and the road: three large adults chowing down on bales of hay and then a group of 15-20 juveniles simply walking along further back from the fence. We saw a lot of white pelicans on Lake Pepin, which is a wide place in the river, and we stopped in the town of Pepin. My favorite jewelry store, BNOX, is closed during the week. But the owner was out front planting flowers, and she opened the store for us. So -- bison, birds and jewelry. A nice sunny day.
*
Patrick, my brother and I went to the Minneapolis Art Institute and looked at the East Asian collection, which is impressive. We did not touch the art, though my brother and I remembered touching the jade mountain as kids. It was not in a plexy case when it was at the Walker, and we could use our fingers to walk up the steps carved in the mountain. I couldn't see any signs of our finger marks. It's better that it's in a case now.
*
During my brother's four day visit spring arrived. The grass has turned green. The trees are leafing out. Forsythia and magnolias are blossoming. The sky is a very specific, bright and clear spring color.

More from Facebook

More from the facebook discussion of writing. I love sercon, serious conversation, and I managed to get a pretty good discussion going on facebook. This makes me happy.

I have my own arguments with science fiction, though the field has changed so much that many of my arguments are with a previous generation. Anyway, the vision of SF as a field of working writers -- pound it out, send it out, get paid and to hell with art -- can be offensive. But the focus on gritty reality can also be helpful. Learn the rules of the game and keep up on them, because they change, and don't whine. Or rather, whine with your friends in a corner. Everyone needs to whine sometimes. But don't publish your whining.

And as David Gerrold wrote in a comment earlier -- remember that you write because you love writing. The action itself. The making of stories. I tend to forget how passionate my love of fiction can be. How good I feel when I read something I love, and how happy I can feel when the writing is going well.

SF and Literary Fiction

This started as a comment, responding to a comment by Foxessa on the previous post. Then it got too long.

Foxessa wrote:

Um, the resources for learning publishing in NYC -- even for the class so despised by this genre -- are incredibly numerous. For pete's sake, they teach courses in it at NYU, even, that bastion of literary writing. Ah-hem.

Why is it so important to genre writers to believe such nonsense about fiction writers who don't do genre?

A single clueless writer is no more representative of anything than an sf/f clueless self-published writer -- and there are throngs of them too.

I am the genre writer in question here, and I was curious about how people who are not SF, romance or mystery writers learn practical information, because I didn't know. I have since found out more about "literary" networking. There are classes on publishing in writing programs, as Foxessa notes. There are organizations such as PEN. There is the entire network of writers employed by universities and colleges. There is The Loft in Minneapolis, which is the largest "literary" organization in the country. I should have thought of The Loft. It's in the next city over, and the guy who teaches many of practical knowledge classes started as a science fiction writer, then became an editor, agent and manuscript fixer. I have known him for decades.

So, as it turns out, there are plenty of ways for "literary" writers to get practical information. The author of the Salon article used none of them. It makes him look even more clueless.

My question was based on ignorance and curiosity, and now I know more than I knew before. That is the purpose of questions.

Why are genre authors prejudiced against non-genre authors? For many years writers and critics of "literary fiction" sneered at science fiction. They haven't entirely stopped. This has produced a lot of piled-up-through-the-decades anger. The walls between science fiction and mainstream fiction have slowly broken down, and the anger is no longer entirely appropriate. But I hold grudges for a long time.

I have more to say about post WWII American literary fiction, but I've decided -- after struggling with the topic all day -- that I will not write more at the moment. I don't think I know enough to be coherent. What I have is gut feelings and prejudices.

Self-Publishing

Another post from facebook. It's really too long for facebook.

I just read another Salon essay by a frustrated literary writer, who has self-published his fourth novel as an e-book and can't get any reviews. His previous three novels came out on paper from New York houses. He seems to have no idea what he's doing, and I guess my question is, how do you find out if you are a literary writer? An SF writer can gather information about publishing and promotion at cons, the SFWA bulletin, the SFWA site (I assume), online discussion groups, blogs... I think the same is true of romance and mystery writers. Does anything comparable exist for literary writers? The only thing I could think of is writing workshops. There are a zillion literary writing workshops, or were the last time I checked.

I was amazed by how hurt and clueless he was. He published three novels and was dropped. Well, this is painful, but it happens to many writers. He and his agent decided that he should self-publish his next novel as an e-book. As far as I can tell, he did not consider changing his name (if the problem was prior sales) or going to an independent publisher. Neither he nor the agent appeared to know anything about e-publishing.

My two writing groups have self-published print-on-paper collections. It's not that expensive. We did it more for fun than anything else and have not made a serious effort at marketing. But you end with a concrete object, which local bookstores can carry. There is always a display of local authors, even at Barnes and Noble. There is a chance of getting a review at the local paper, if you have a tangible book. There are awards given by associations of independent publishers, and your book might win. (Remember that you have become an independent publisher by putting out your book.) Awards are always nice, even small ones. And you have something you can put on your shelf. You may have many copies to put on your shelf.

I guess what I'm saying is -- the two obvious ways to promote are through a genre community, if your work is genre, or through a regional community. Authors have to live somewhere. If you are an unsuccessful novelist in New York, you might consider moving to a place that has fewer writers.

And I have not a clue how to promote an e-book, if you are an author without a following.