October 17, 2008 · 2:38 pm

writing fantasy

Structure as if you’re a pornographer, but don’t deliver the money shot. Instead try to replace it with the very thing the story doesn’t want to see. What’s the form guilty about ? What’s it frightened of ? What’s it trying to hide ? Deliver that instead.

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9 Responses to writing fantasy

  1. mckie
    October 17, 2008 at 9:40 pm

    I’ve always thought it was interesting that lots of “literary” writers (amis fils and david foster wallace being the most obvious recent examples) love writing long analytical pieces about the manufacture of pornography for newspaper magazines.
    And there’s a certain amount of interest in what they write, but they are (like the form) always fundamentally unsatisfactory.
    I think part of the problem is that liberal middle-class blase thing of being too cool to say the two obvious things which are true of porn for most people: It excites me, and/or, It revolts me.
    What I’d like to see is somebody writing about porn as de-meaning, rather than just demeaning. It’s Marx’s reduction of people to objects taken to the nth degree. Isn’t that the guilty secret of the creators and the viewer?

  2. uzwi
    October 18, 2008 at 10:01 am

    De-meaning is one of the great central secret guilts of commercial genre fiction too–covered by the “entertainment” clause, as in porn. Repetitiveness is the symptom. But haven’t Barthes & others said all this ? It’s barely possible to walk down a street these days without being de-meaned one way or another. My real difficulty is to perform that psychic sleight which allows you to see it as an invitation–come on in, the semiotics are fine.

  3. Veg clothing
    October 18, 2008 at 6:55 pm

    I think you pulled this off most successfully in the Viriconium books. I came to the series late and read them as one book. I remember reading it, thinking, this is a form fighting itself. It’s amazing that this sort of internal conflict resulted in an extraordinary work of art rather than an implosion.
    The same thing with COTH. The reason that book meant so much to me was that I realized reading it, you could make art without having a fixed position on the world. You could have two opposite positions simultaneously. Ofcourse I’m always worried I’ve misread your books, but that’s how I felt.
    The comparison with porn is interesting because I don’t think you’re talking about satire. Or am I wrong ?

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  5. Aaron White
    October 20, 2008 at 2:28 am

    The subject of porn in the fuller sense, not simply sexual porn, but violence porn, religion porn, lifestyle porn, etc. is of great interest to me. As a young fantasy reader I preferred Shannara/Dragonlance-style Tolkien strip-mining to Tolkien. Dispense with all that boring stuff about elven language and such cultural folderol; get on with the action, I implored. But best of all I liked stories about Chosen Children fulfilling their magnificent destinies.

    I suspect my Predestined Presbyterian upbringing fed into this, but I loved the idea of being preordained for excellence, Manifest Destiny style.

  6. Tim Etchells
    October 20, 2008 at 2:05 pm

    The more general thing I am interested in in this is the idea of taking genre, or anything we might think of as an established language structure (a voice, a world, a narrative pattern etc) and forcing it into a confrontation with the thing it most can’t deal with, or with the thing it most wants to avoid/deny. There’s something very dynamic in this – the sense of continuous strain, confrontation, denial esp when it’s done at a formal level (rather than, or as well as, say thru the interaction of ‘characters’).

    More specifically I love Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel’s film Performance for reasons that connect to all this. The gangster movie that somehow degenerates into a home-made acid trip movie – all the certainties of the former get fed into a kaleidoscope – funny and frightening.

  7. uzwi
    October 20, 2008 at 3:07 pm

    Tim: That’s the motor for me too. When you talk about “horror” (but also joissance), there it is, in the fallout & confusion from that confrontation. &, yes, formally, rather than in “edgy” characters–which often just turn out to be restatements, reformalisations of the original trope. The thing should turn on itself & become, in formal terms, or in terms of its genre, ugly & wrong.

  8. Martin
    October 20, 2008 at 4:31 pm

    All that confusion and nudging fall-out in “Performance” summed up by this layer-cake of irony:

    Fox: Why don’t you play us a tune, son?

    Jagger: I don’t *like* music.

    Fox: Comical little geezer – you’ll look funny when you’re 50.

    De-meaned and re-meaned!

    Actually, one of the most “pornographic” novels I know is “Felicia’s Journey.” Without being explicit, Trevor uses the cadences of porn to put us inside his serial killer’s mind, where women are at first reified and then made into the prettified dead.
    Making him a catering manager surrounded by sweet desserts only renders it more sickly than ever. It’s a life that should be stuffed with jouissance (of a terrible sort), but one which Trevor quickly reveals to be psychotically pointless.

  9. Krishna
    October 21, 2008 at 4:43 pm

    A young man once took this very advice and before he could stop himself he’d become David Lynch.