Rat Stew
A Column for
Tom Sadler’s APA zine
The Reluctant Famulus
TRF #96
by Gene Stewart
Heads-Up-Display: Don’t Blink
Shit floats and imagines itself superior.
That’s what came to me as I thought about writing. As I thought about how categorical thinking, category publishing, and strict adherence to genre patterns and lists has degraded a great deal of the mid-list even as those who rise to acclaim and attention tend to be exceptions to all those rules, that’s what came to me.
There is a rumor that anyone can write anything they wish and end up “making it” in publishing. It’s a lie. Seductive and clever, subtle and alluring, but a lie.
In point of fact, professional writers learn quickly that, to have their work chosen by agents, editors, and publishers, it must conform to relatively narrow parameters. It must echo what has sold before. It must be presented in a way already established to be clearly understood by the book-buying public.
In many ways, this is simply an adult view. After all, publishers are taking a chance, spending money, and hoping to earn profit. Yes, they’ve refined their business over the years to include layers of predatory assurances that money will be made, but who can blame them? They’re not in it for the art.
In other ways, however, what has happened in publishing resembles what happened to America’s steel and auto industries. By sticking with what worked great in the 1800s, and never upgrading methods, approaches, and views, they managed to let themselves become first antiquated, then irrelevant. When US Steel closed it’s Sparrow’s Point steel plant, the place was still operating as it had in the 1800s. Nary a robot or automation in sight.
How does this relate to publishing? Not a single publisher spotted the digital age looming, despite some of them publishing books analyzing that very thing. To this day there are publishers that refuse to accept electronic submissions, insisting upon paper copies of manuscripts sent by mail, preferably via Pony Express.
Their view of the material they handle has, likewise, been kept from changing. By the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, Modernism was reshaping writing with a fresh bluntness, yet it took until the 1960s for the frank language and uncompromising portrayals of real life to appear uncensored on the printed page. Even then it was often treated coyly, or banned by blue nose groups.
Pulp fiction grew up but publishing did not recognize this to any great degree. To this day, science fiction is generally viewed by New York City publishers as pulp crap to be ignored, sneered at, and occasionally exploited for the semi-literates who buy it for the garish covers. That’s their attitude. Horror fares worse, having inherited science fiction’s old mantle of “one step sideways from pornography”.
Meanwhile, erotic content, a blending of genre elements, and a disregard of limitations has flourished in small press editions. Ah, but only to a degree. Small press quickly hitched itself to the train of thought whereby exploiting niche markets is the only way to prosper on such a marginal venture.
The internet has proven even small press insufficiently flexible to keep up with what serious writers are now embracing, creating, and publishing directly to their readers. No middle man means no filter, no gatekeepers, no more doormen arrogantly picking and choosing who is lucky enough to get in.
As to making money, the greed has yet to catch up and no one has yet figured out how to nail down a model that works across the board. It’s hit-or-miss right now, touch-and-go on a viral level. So many are putting out so much writing now online that it’s impossible to keep up, and damned nearly impossible to sift good from bad.
Which brings us back to considering what makes for quality.
If quality is based on topic, then many toics are banned from serious writing. That’s the message. If the mere presence of a topic, or element, zombies, say, suffices automatically to bar the work from serious consideration, or from being considered serious, worthy of the effort of intellectual, informed scrutiny, then we begin to see art as a product of the approved, agreed-upon sanctioned, official version of our world, not as artful as much as a reinforcement of societal prejudices.
Is art a buttress to bigotry? Is that all it is? What it’s for? Why we do it?
If, on the other hand, quality depends on excellence of execution, on how and not what, then good writing, serious writing exists where it is found, regardless of its topic or included elements.
I choose in my work to emphasize the latter view, as I do in my reading. I do not avoid particular genres, I do not duck categories, and I do not veer away from books or stories simply because they contain a particular element or are focused on a certain topic.
Does the inclusion of a ghost, for instance, destroy quality? If so, what of Hamlet by Shakespeare or Dombey & Son by Dickens? Bleak House by Dickens even contains a case of Spontaneous Human Combustion. Are we to throw away his masterful examination of the law and the insidious way it permeates society high and low because it has this outré element? Dickens himself apologizes in an afterword for including this incident, then presents an overview of the research that led him to feel justified in presenting it as part of a faithful presentation of real life. He is at pains not to mislead his readers, he says, an interesting show of integrity that contrasts to much of today’s fiction, which seems to seek misleading notions as standard fare.
Would UFOs disqualify a work for serious consideration by the National Book Award, Pulitzer, Man-Booker, or even Nobel literary prize committees? How about a toilet plunger-shaped extraterrestrial from an obviously imaginary planet that communicates by farting and tap-dancing? Or a CIA agent in red long-johns carrying a sparkly fairy wand who recruits a man to become a Nazi spy? Such items abound in the works of Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-5 and Mother Night being the two cited here. Is his work, then, not profoundly serious in its examination of the human condition in times of both war and peace, if such there be?
Oddly, the academic dismissal of much fiction due to such topics or the inclusion of certain elements as being genre, and thus automatically unimportant, is itself categorical, or genre, thinking. Meanwhile, genre’s argument that it is the handling, not what is handled, that defines artistry is precisely an academic stance.
They fight each other’s war with their opponents’ weapons.
It’s depressing. One of the benefits of chronic depression, though, is the soothing apathy.
Write what and how you want. Put it out there how ever you can. Hope for resonance. Hope harder that any traction your writing gets will lead somehow to you being paid.
Keep going as far as you can and try to fall forward.
“What tortured, shriveled things our lives are,” Sherlock said on the CBS show ELEMENTARY. He later added, “I weep for the whole desperate lot of you.”
When I heard those lines I knew he was talking to us writers via the post-literate audio-visual fiction delivery system, itself already a dinosaur among electronic entertainment.
Played a good hands-free HUD/RPG lately? How sure are you that’s not what this is?
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