Howard Suber’s secret weapon
Sometimes you can’t exactly see what it is you’ve created until you see it though other people’s eyes. It was the prolific comedian, culture commentator and writer, Kevin Maher who first clued me in to what my debut novel Monument 14 really is.
He asked me to do a reading from my novel in a show called “Genre-busters.” He told me he’d like me to talk about the juncture of Young Adult and Post-apocalyptic literature.
And then, ahem, I realized I had written an post-apocalyptic YA book. I don’t know why I didn’t realize it earlier. I wrote the thing! It took me over a year! But somehow I was just telling the story of what happens when fourteen kids get stranded in a super-store while civilization collapses outside. I knew I was writing for my favorite genre – YA, but I didn’t quite realize that I was also writing in my other favorite genre – post-apocalyptic.
Lucky for me, too, because nowadays, most successful fiction is biassociative. Biassociation is a concept I was introduced to at UCLA by Professor Howard Suber. In this example, it simply means a single unity that draws on the associations of two or more distinct categories or genres.
A film or novel could have a biassociative genre – here’s a really obvious one: Cowboys and Aliens! The two genres are right there in the title. Here’s a more subtle example: Romancing the Stone (Romance and action/adventure). A character can also be bi-associative. Often a hero in a story will belong to two groups. Think of Indiana Jones (anthropologist/treasure hunter), or Superman (mild-mannered reporter/superhero), or Lisbeth Salander (punk misfit/brilliant investigator).
Once you start looking for examples of biassociative works across genres or character types, you see them EVERYWHERE! (If you’d like to mention a few, just click on the title of this blog article to leave a comment. I’d LOVE to hear your examples.)
Professor Suber liked to point out the biassociative elements in all the big hit films we would discuss in class. He was continually asking us to measure our own works in terms of the biassociative criteria. Well, how does your won work hold up? Are you taking advantage of genre when you begin a new project?
