Month: November 2023

Bradbury’s Big Ideas

I’m teaching The Martian Chronicles again, something I haven’t done for almost a decade. I think the last time I taught a science fiction novel of any kind was 2014 or 2015 when I read Fahrenheit 451 with an Honors American Lit class (you can see my affinity for Bradbury).

Of course, the first comment I received from the students this year was, “This is WEIRD,” and yes, kids, it’s weird. It’s SCIENCE FICTION. I would think that in 2023, in America, in which we are ruled by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and in which new Star Wars and Star Trek shows spring up like daisies), a science fiction novel wouldn’t weird these students out.

But it has. We are about a third of the way through, and while they are starting to groove to Bradbury’s particular brand of magic stardust, they are still a little befuddled and bewildered by the strangeness of things. I mean, it IS a strange book, but that’s part of the fun! Science fiction’s strangeness is part of its charm, part of why I like to read it.

As I keep reminding the students, science fiction is a genre of ideas. It’s all about the Metaphors (as Bradbury liked to call them). About the Big Questions. About life and death and God and the meaning of time and the power of memories and the ways in which our imagination can wield incredible, life-altering power. It’s about the eternal stuff, the primordial stuff. The point and purpose of life.

And things have to get a little weird if we want to get to these big ideas. When we ride on Bradbury’s rocket ship, we have to be ready for wonders. After all, life and death and God are all pretty strange things. Think about them for a moment and wonder: Why did life even begin? Why did the universe become the universe? Why must things die, why not infinite growth, infinite life, etc.? Why did God make all this (if you believe in God and his creative spirit)? And if there is no God, why not? What is the meaning of things without him?

And even the more practical questions: Why do we hope to find life on other planets? Why do we want to go to other planets? What will happen if we ever meet an alien species? How will we save our own planet from the destruction we’ve wrought against it? Can it be saved? What will we do to the other planets in our solar system? What will we do to ourselves in pursuit of these things?

What is happiness? What is love? What is memory? What is time?

To play in these fields of wonder, Bradbury must write with fire and rocket fuel. I am loving the experience of rereading the novel, and I’m also enjoying how my students are reacting to it. Despite all the science fiction television and movies around them, this almost-seventy-year-old book is still knocking them around, still peeling back the layers of metaphor and thought to reveal hard questions underneath.

Working Writer

I chose this title on purpose because “working writer” could mean a writer who makes her financial living AS a writer (which is probably the most common way we use the term), or it could mean a writer who has to work a different job to pay the bills (I’ll admit, this interpretation is my own invention). There’s the “working writer” and there’s the writer who works (another job).

A recent article in Esquire raised the question of whether it’s ever been harder to make a living as a writer, specifically a writer who writes novels and/or fiction, and the answer, not surprisingly, is that yeah, it’s pretty hard these days. Most fiction writers don’t survive on their book advances or royalties and thus must take to writing for TV or holding down teaching jobs.

As always, these types of articles completely ignore independent publishing and fiction writers who forgo the traditional publishing world. Not that every indie writer makes a living from her writing either, but there are many who do, and they never seem to get much ink spilled about them in these trad-focused think-pieces.

Despite this gaping hole, the article does raise some larger economic and even philosophical questions that I’ve been wrestling with myself for several years. It’s no secret that I quit my day job to become a freelance editor and author, and that the financial precariousness of that situation was something I didn’t find tenable for the short term (and maybe even the long term). It turns out, I happen to like getting a paycheck with regularity, and I like knowing that I can get health insurance without too much trouble either (though currently I’m on my husband’s insurance). I like knowing that I don’t have to write to survive. It takes a lot of pressure off the writing, keeping it fun and light. More play than work.

What struck me was a quote early on in the piece, from an author named Andrew Lipstein, who said, “‘If I’m not just supporting myself by writing, to those who don’t know the reality of it, it seems like it’s a failure in some way.'”

Yup.

See, if someone doesn’t support themselves with their art, then the wider world considers that a “failure.” We must monetize everything, apparently, and when we do, if we’re not making bank on it, then we’re somehow deficient in our talents and our art just isn’t very good. Money equals quality, obvs. If you’re only making coffee money on your art, then you’re a loser. That’s the message from our culture. We get it delivered from our earliest days when adults ask us as children what we “want to be when we grow up.” They mean our job, yo. What are we gonna do to pay the bills, and if we’re lucky, add some value to the world?

And listen, deep in my heart, if I could make a living from my writing, I’m not sure I would turn that down. I wrestle with the desire constantly. For one thing, I wouldn’t have to split myself in two (and three and four) to get all the things done I need and want to get done. Most days I’m split between teacher-self, writer-self, mom-self, wife-self, and human-with-a-body-and-a-house-self. If I could cut out one of those things, teacher-self would be the first on the chopping block. Not because I don’t enjoy teaching (I do at the moment), but because all those other things are non-negotiable. Yes, even writer. Without my art, I would not be whole. And my mom/wife/human self is just Who I Am. So teacher-self is the one optional thing, and thus, in a world in which I’m not worried about money, that would be the one to go.

But writer-self, as the Esquire article points out, is not as viable a way to pay the bills as other professions are. And while the article ignores indie publishing, I’ll say that even for indie authors, the vast majority of us don’t pay our bills with our writing either. So in that way, the article is right in the broad sense that writing fiction for a “living” is a hard row to hoe.

Still, the article’s obvious bias in favor of traditional publishing, and literary fiction in particular, obscures what could have been a much more nuanced and multilayered picture of what a “job” in writing fiction could and does mean in our current situation. It ignores pulp writers, and it ignores people who write and publish online at places like Substack or Royal Road. I don’t know all the ins and outs of such a picture and would’ve been curious to find out more. I’d like to know who exactly is making money from their fiction and how, and not just the MFA people who write for Hollywood, because that job is about as unlikely to me and the average fiction writer as is becoming the next George R.R. Martin.

What I hoped to learn from the piece was how ALL the myriad types of writers are trying to make ends meet and how the internet might be an asset or a hinderance (or at least a newer paradigm that shakes up the old world of publishing). We did get a bit about AI, and I have to say, AI flooding the market with books does concern me, even if those books right now aren’t very good (or violate copyright). And I appreciated the point about the Authors Guild not being able to collectively bargain. The fact that authors can’t unionize is shitty, and it just goes to show how our laws often make things harder for writers and artists to make a living with their work. The question of health insurance is another roadblock.

Still, I keep thinking about this idea of success being tied to income, and how my writing is only successful if I can monetize it and make a “living.” This is the mark of achievement. Any intrinsic value I might place on my art is meaningless in this framework, and if I can’t “cut it” as a working writer, then I’ve failed. That sense of failure lingers with me even as I’ve happily returned to teaching. Despite my happy return to the classroom, I still harbor dreams of making all my money from my books, and yet I continue to wonder if those dreams are coming from my heart or from what I’ve been socialized and conditioned to desire. Would I really be happier if I was a “working writer” as opposed to a writer who works?

The question is hard to disentangle from how we think about work and art and money. The fact that it’s so hard to “make it” as an artist says something about what our society values, and I’m afraid that message isn’t very comforting to those of us who want to make art.

Fantasy Lit Is Basically Prestige TV

Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake, but when I read Jared Shurin’s observation about the influence prestige TV dramas have had on fantasy novels over the last decade, I knew immediately that he’d put into words that overwhelming but unnameable feeling I’ve been having since forever about fantasy fiction and why I feel so out of step with what’s going on in the current literary landscape.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy prestige TV shows. I watched Game of Thrones. I used to write weekly recaps/reviews of Mad Men for a film website. I will go to the grave saying The Americans is the best fucking show ever made. I like all these programs and others too. I’m in favor of well-made serialized dramas on my TV screen.

But what I’m not so in favor of, I guess (thought I’m stilling working this out within my own brain), is the transformation of books into text-based TV shows, and particularly fantasy fiction, which AS FANTASY, has the capacity to go beyond what can be perceived with our eyes and into the realms of dreaming and language and, well, the fantastic, i.e.: that which cannot be understood with our senses but goes beyond those limits, and that if we surrender the literary landscape to the grammar of cinematic storytelling (of which, I must note, I’m a huge fan), we’re on our way to losing something special in our written stories, something that we might not even remember existed if we keep aping the structure and conventions of TV and movies.

What I’m really getting at, I think, is that while I’ve certainly loved books like Black Sun and She Who Became the Sun and The City We Became and This Is How You Lose the Time War, I can also TOTALLY see them as TV shows, and that’s not just because at this point in our history we can pretty much see any book as a TV show eventually. It’s because these books (yes, even Time War) follow the structure and storytelling conventions of prestige television almost perfectly. Multiple viewpoints (aka the A story, B story, and C story of a TV show), sequences and chapters that could very easily translate into a single episode of a show, and the kind of complex characterization that makes for juicy roles top-notch actors want to play.

None of this is a criticism by the way. Again, I LIKE this stuff.

But it’s only one way to tell a story. And for fantasy — a genre in which the only thing limiting the author are the made-up rules of her own made-up secondary world — it feels like we’ve traded something expansive for something rather more… limited.

Look, I get it. Conventions change. Reader expectations change. Prestige TV is dope as shit, so why wouldn’t we want our books to do the same thing?

But then I read something like Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales (or, like, “Smith of Wooten Major”), or John Bellairs’s The Face in the Frost, or a Clark Ashton Smith short story, and I’m like, “This could be a TV show, but in doing so, a lot would have to change.” The translation from written word to cinematic image would be just that: a translation. And something would be lost in the process.

Talented filmmakers could certainly make something of these stories, and they might even be genius things, but they would be fundamentally different things from the written literature.

Think about the previous Narnia movie adaptations, and consider what might come of Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming attempts, and then go back and reread the Chronicles of Narnia. It’s not that they are “unfilmable” or some such nonsense. They are perfectly adaptable to cinema.

But the cinematic versions would need to alter the literary ones. Choices would need to be made that go beyond just, “What should we cut for time?”

This was the particular talent of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillippa Boyens when they adapted The Lord of the Rings to the screen. They made a lot of changes, and whether you think those changes were necessary or not, they resulted in three movies that are pretty fucking great, both as adaptations of the source material and as movies in their own right.

And then think about how sloggy and stilted something like Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is. Rowling was still writing in the age before all our base are belong to prestige TV.

Not that anyone writing in the 20th or 21st century can escape the influence of cinema entirely, but the prestige TV template hadn’t quite solidified yet in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was starting to (I’m looking at you George R.R. Martin, former TV writer… I mean, is it any wonder Game of Thrones became one of the most successful prestige shows of the last twenty years? It’s like the guy knew how to write things that would play well on TV!), but the influence of television on our literary landscape wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as it is now.

Movies? Yes.

But HBO-style TV, with its multiple viewpoints and intersecting story lines and character-focused narratives, not so much.

That’s why it was so important to get it right when taking a book and making it into a movie. So much could go wrong in that translation.

But now, book to (small) screen feels almost effortless. Sure, we may have to cut here and condense there, but in the main, it’s all right there on the page. A show bible ready-made.

I know I sound grumpy about it, and maybe I am, but I also know that I love these books-that-could-be-TV-shows-because-TV-shows-are-how-we-tell-stories-now. I really, really like a lot of these fantasy series! And yes, I would totally watch the TV adaptation if/when it comes out.

But I also kind of like the omniscient narrator? And stories with just one viewpoint character? And fantastical elements that defy visualization? And maybe stories with characters that are maybe a little “flat” (hello, Conan!) but are still awesome anyway because fantasy is a genre that delivers on maybe more than just deep characterization.

Like, maybe, drama and snappy dialogue aren’t the things I always need from my fantasy. Maybe I need weirdness. And wonder. And a strangeness that cannot be translated to the TV screen. And something older, like a fairy tale. And not the new kind where everyone is a fully-realized, three-dimensional person with motivations and psychological depth, but the old kind, where everyone is an archetype and acts weird AF sometimes, and we just accept it because we don’t need psychological realism in our Grimm.

I don’t know. I’m just thinking through some stuff, I guess.

But man, when I read Shurin’s point about prestige TV, it was like the scales fell from my eyes. It’s why I’m a bit out of step both as a writer and a reader. I like prestige TV, and I like the way modern fantasy novels are written, but I also like the old stuff too, the less prestige-y stuff. The weird stuff and the ancient. I kinda wish we could have more of it. Maybe we do, and I’m not reading it (highly possible). If it is, I want to know. I want to read something that can only be read, that lives in words best of all and isn’t a word-version of something practically cinematic.

Fantasy is expansive. I don’t want it narrowed down to a set of storytelling conventions that emerged from only one form of media.

However, as Shurin points out, it IS “slightly reductive” to reduce all currently-popular fantasy literature to this one thing, and it’s not as if This Is How You Lose the Time War (or insert other popular novel) is merely a film treatment. That IS too reductive, and something like Time War is also an epistolary novel, which has a long and venerable tradition that predates TV by a long shot. So maybe my griping is taking things too far. Maybe I need to chill.

Nevertheless, our society is a cinematic one. The moving image dominates our thoughts and dreams and our entertainment, and as Shurin predicts, the next great influence on fantasy literature will be (video) gaming, so yeah, we can’t escape the image makers. I’m intrigued by the ways gaming can influence our literary storytelling, so again, it’s not that I’m opposed to this sort of cross-pollinating. I’m just wondering: Is it possible to have a successful (i.e.: widely read) fantasy novel these days that doesn’t get its storytelling paradigm from prestige TV (or video games or INSERT NEW VISUAL MEDIUM HERE)? We still read classic fantasy, yes, but those books have the backing of time and reputation. We read them because we’ve been told we should read them, or because age bestows a kind of authority.

Like with so many things, a throwback — a new piece of art that hearkens to an earlier form — can be seen either as a delightfully retro oddity or as simply “out of step.” But these throwbacks are catering to a niche crowd, to those who intentionally seek out the strange and “arty.” The popular stuff, the stuff that garners widespread attention, fits itself (most often) within the current paradigm. It might do things a little differently, but not too different. There’s a sweet-spot that such things often hit — the spot between familiar and new — that is precisely what makes them both popular and critically acclaimed. This is the way of things. There’s no sense yelling at the clouds about it. It always has been and always will be.

What I wonder is if we can ever again escape the velocity of cinematic storytelling when it comes to literature. Or does the moving image (in whatever form, even gaming) simply have too much allure. Has our collective imagination been too thoroughly colonized by cinema to ever go back (or forward) to something else? Do we even want to try something else? Maybe it’s just me, the weird freak who wants more flat characters and overt “telling” in my fantasy novels, and is kind of sick of snappy dialogue, and pines for the omniscient narrator. Not all the time, but sometimes. The dictates of the market are one thing; what fantasy literature has the potential to be is something else.

Writing a poem with my students

We took a rough draft poem and tried to add more imagery and stronger diction. This is what we came up with:

The wound of you
slices across my heart.
The gash runs deep and purple,
but eventually, it scabs over,
leaving a jagged scar and
a dull ache.

Will your loss kill me?

I’ve cried all my tears,
run dry like an empty desert.
My throat tightens, feels bloody.
Your memory gushes forth and
spills onto the starlit sand.
I lap it up, quenching my thirst,
savoring the sharp remnants
of you.

© 2024 Jennifer M. Baldwin

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑