Genre crossovers
Feb. 24th, 2012 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI woke up with thoughts on why when non-genre writers come up with something that is science fiction but they're all It's Not Science Fiction it doesn't tend to work.
Or, more broadly, on why the rules of genre need to be understood by writers, because they're part of the understanding of readers.
It's not just cause some writers give the impression of holding their nose to work with all the stuff science fiction readers actually like.
It's like the other day I was reading/saying about the venn diagram of genre overlap, here. You think of a great paranormal romance in space with cowboys and you think it's the best thing ever because it'll appeal to three different audiences! But then it only appeals to the tiny slice that likes all three.
Well science fiction that tries to appeal to people who don't like science fiction shaves bits off SF and some other genre, soap or whatever, and smushes them together. And it sometimes thinks it's showing SF how to be proper literary, or making SF have a broader appeal, or whatever. But it's really only going to appeal to people who like both side, the lit fic or soap or whatever and the SF.
Sometimes that works, sometimes it don't.
There's quite a lot of people who like SF, for some definitions of SF. Look at the list of top grossing films. It's a pretty broad genre. There's room for a lot of different likes.
There's also quite a lot of people (I was going to say fanboys but some of them aren't male probably) who think a really large proportion of those who like SF are Doing It Wrong. I think some writing is trying to reveal to the audience why they're liking the wrong things, and, well, audiences don't like that.
There's also the way new to the genre writers tend to reinvent the wheel. Or miss what seems like essential features to the long time fan. Doesn't matter which genre, that happens a lot. Readers build up a large set of intertextual references and draw on schemas they've been stocking their whole lives. If writers can't reference the appropriate things or activate the appropriate schemas they can't choose the right words to make the effect they're after. They might seem empty or like they're trying to rebuild everything from scratch without the resonances, but more likely they'll remind most of their audience of things the writers have no knowledge of. If you can pull in intertexts you're in dialogue with it can add a lot of richness to the story, with fanfic as the obvious example, there's deep backstory under every character. There's deep backstory under every genre trope too, if you know enough to draw on it.
Genre also sets up expectations. On TV Tropes there's Genre Savvy and there's Wrong Genre Savvy. If your readers are more genre savvy than you, you will not surprise them, even when you think you're being brilliant. If they turn out to be savvy to a different genre than they've actually been watching? You have set up the desire for one story, and delivered another. Epic fail time, especially in the massive ratings drop off. Your initial deployment of tropes and references drew in audiences who wanted chocolate, you served them vanilla. The vanilla lovers never sat down, and the chocolate lovers think you missed out the flavour. Sad.
I worry because I have a story that keeps on wanting to kick off with a kind of scene they won't be having much of, and the first ten minutes are like a promise to the reader/viewer about what they're going to get if they stay with you. Starting with a sex scene works great in fandom, but if it's the only sex scene in the whole story, not so much with the working great, because wrong appetites whetted.
Then there's the reading tools a genre reader brings to the text. Detective story readers know that, very soon, the characters they're being introduced to will encounter a crime, and one of them did it. They're looking for clues about motivation and method and opportunity. SF readers know that soon the world they're being introduced to is going to do something surprising or otherwise worth the reading, and motive method opportunity applies again, but not just to the characters. They're looking for clues about how this world works, everything from the physical laws on up. And they're looking for evidence you're standing on the shoulders of giants, in dialogue with earlier texts, using or arguing with conclusions others have drawn. Or just that you know you don't have to invent a new word for ansible or hyperspace. The thing is, the different genres lead to different reading techniques, where different things are foregrounded. In detective fiction you're looking for stuff like who is living beyond their means, who is jealous, who has a scandal brewing. In science fiction you're looking for... actually it's harder to say because it's all the fiction I read so I feel like you're looking for all the important stuff... Hmmm, you're looking for how the technology, biology, sociology, setting and characters are interacting. Like if there's a cool new gadget or three, or if there are aliens. You're looking for how science will create plot. Or blow stuff up. Depending. But you are looking, and it's kind of like, if someone in a detective story waves a phone around then it might be because they're trying to call for help, or because the contacts list has important clues, or because like Sherlock you can read its history in scratch marks and deduce everything from socio-economic background to state of health of the user. If someone in science fiction is waving a phone around, the phone does something really cool.
If your readers know which genre the writer thinks they're in, then the things that are foregrounded are the things the writer intends the audience to notice. If the writer doesn't understand these reading patterns, the reader will be looking for signal in noise, and getting ever more frustrated.
Like I get frustrated trying to read the stuff we get set for lit class. Nothing happens, to people that are not very interesting. The clues are there in the lexis if you dig, but basically for the Short Story teacher if you assume it's going to be about one of isolation, alienation and ennui, you're probably half way there. And the rest is in figuring out if it's about sex or suicide (usually suicide). I don't know why she reads this stuff or what she gets out of it. She has said she doesn't get science fiction. I think we're just looking for story in different places.
So if a writer comes in from out of genre, into whatever genre, daytime medical drama or evening soaps or spy stories or romance or the one I actually understand, SF, then what they need to know is what the audience is looking for and what they're going to be looking at. And if you try and combine two genres - even unwittingly, like thinking you're going from 'normal' tv to a genre - you have to resolve any clashes or paradoxes in what the audiences are going to be reading for. You have to provide them with information in the channels they expect. Or they'll just decide you're rubbish and go away.
Genres that set up what kind of ending you can expect but use the same reading clues seem like easier mixes than ones that think the clues are in different places. But if you're mixing a romance into a science fiction story then some people are looking for clues about which guy she'll choose and some people are looking for clues about how the gadgets will save the day. Mixing that takes work.
There's also more subtle differences in shared values and prevailing ideologies. I will rapidly be wrong no matter what I say about this, because there's bazillions, but I'll have a go at an example. The contrast I have noticed in different episodes of some SF is between stories where brain matters and stories where it does not.
Like, in some stories, things happen, you look for clues, you apply rational deduction, you formulate a plan, and you do something tricksy and clever. The audience can be just as clever given the same clues. These are brain stories.
But there are other stories where things happen, things happen, things happen, boom splat pow, and you have feeeeeeelings about them, and are all ARRGH and WOW, and mostly you hang on for the ride, and when it rolls to a stop you realise the most useful quality for survival in that world is nothing to do with brains, it's just endurance. Like the kind of detective story where you figure out who the bad guy is by surviving all the attempts to kill you. The deduction is process of elimination, and persistence is going to win the day. These are not so much brain stories.
Different people like them. Personally I like applying brain to problem and the idea that thinking about things can lead to making things better. So I may misdescribe the favourite stories of other teams.
I'm sure there's people who think it's about heart vs brain, and how caring is more important than being tricksy. But I tend to think that caring is inadequate until you figure out something useful to do about it, and all that Use The Force bit and Trust Your Feelings tends to annoy me a little these days, because that's not even about heart, that's about saying the world is easier to deal with if you put the blast shield down, and really, no. I wouldn't want a Jedi to drive a bus, you know? Faith is no replacement for looking.
Or, to skip discourses entirely, you need wisdom and compassion both. But that's a whole other set of stories.
SO, anyway, if you're packaging a story to appeal to a crowd that favours one set of survival strategies, they will respond to stories turning into the other set as if they've just been told they're Doing It Wrong.
There are many ways to make your audience turn off, but laughing at them and at the idea of the story the believe they're watching is quite high up on the list.
So genre is a long history of texts to reference, that will have built patterns and expectations and a shorthand the reader is drawing on. But it is also a set of writing and reading tools, techniques that foreground different aspects, and ways of approaching decoding the story. If you approach a new genre without familiarising yourself with all that, you're just not going to be communicating what you think you're saying, let alone giving the experience your readers thought the packaging promised.
If a writer thinks they can somehow walk into a genre, pick up on whichever tropes have caught their eye, and otherwise have a clean sheet to start from... language doesn't work like that. Not at the word sized unit, and very much not at the level of story.
We're all working on palimpsests, and we need to understand what we're overwriting.
Or, more broadly, on why the rules of genre need to be understood by writers, because they're part of the understanding of readers.
It's not just cause some writers give the impression of holding their nose to work with all the stuff science fiction readers actually like.
It's like the other day I was reading/saying about the venn diagram of genre overlap, here. You think of a great paranormal romance in space with cowboys and you think it's the best thing ever because it'll appeal to three different audiences! But then it only appeals to the tiny slice that likes all three.
Well science fiction that tries to appeal to people who don't like science fiction shaves bits off SF and some other genre, soap or whatever, and smushes them together. And it sometimes thinks it's showing SF how to be proper literary, or making SF have a broader appeal, or whatever. But it's really only going to appeal to people who like both side, the lit fic or soap or whatever and the SF.
Sometimes that works, sometimes it don't.
There's quite a lot of people who like SF, for some definitions of SF. Look at the list of top grossing films. It's a pretty broad genre. There's room for a lot of different likes.
There's also quite a lot of people (I was going to say fanboys but some of them aren't male probably) who think a really large proportion of those who like SF are Doing It Wrong. I think some writing is trying to reveal to the audience why they're liking the wrong things, and, well, audiences don't like that.
There's also the way new to the genre writers tend to reinvent the wheel. Or miss what seems like essential features to the long time fan. Doesn't matter which genre, that happens a lot. Readers build up a large set of intertextual references and draw on schemas they've been stocking their whole lives. If writers can't reference the appropriate things or activate the appropriate schemas they can't choose the right words to make the effect they're after. They might seem empty or like they're trying to rebuild everything from scratch without the resonances, but more likely they'll remind most of their audience of things the writers have no knowledge of. If you can pull in intertexts you're in dialogue with it can add a lot of richness to the story, with fanfic as the obvious example, there's deep backstory under every character. There's deep backstory under every genre trope too, if you know enough to draw on it.
Genre also sets up expectations. On TV Tropes there's Genre Savvy and there's Wrong Genre Savvy. If your readers are more genre savvy than you, you will not surprise them, even when you think you're being brilliant. If they turn out to be savvy to a different genre than they've actually been watching? You have set up the desire for one story, and delivered another. Epic fail time, especially in the massive ratings drop off. Your initial deployment of tropes and references drew in audiences who wanted chocolate, you served them vanilla. The vanilla lovers never sat down, and the chocolate lovers think you missed out the flavour. Sad.
I worry because I have a story that keeps on wanting to kick off with a kind of scene they won't be having much of, and the first ten minutes are like a promise to the reader/viewer about what they're going to get if they stay with you. Starting with a sex scene works great in fandom, but if it's the only sex scene in the whole story, not so much with the working great, because wrong appetites whetted.
Then there's the reading tools a genre reader brings to the text. Detective story readers know that, very soon, the characters they're being introduced to will encounter a crime, and one of them did it. They're looking for clues about motivation and method and opportunity. SF readers know that soon the world they're being introduced to is going to do something surprising or otherwise worth the reading, and motive method opportunity applies again, but not just to the characters. They're looking for clues about how this world works, everything from the physical laws on up. And they're looking for evidence you're standing on the shoulders of giants, in dialogue with earlier texts, using or arguing with conclusions others have drawn. Or just that you know you don't have to invent a new word for ansible or hyperspace. The thing is, the different genres lead to different reading techniques, where different things are foregrounded. In detective fiction you're looking for stuff like who is living beyond their means, who is jealous, who has a scandal brewing. In science fiction you're looking for... actually it's harder to say because it's all the fiction I read so I feel like you're looking for all the important stuff... Hmmm, you're looking for how the technology, biology, sociology, setting and characters are interacting. Like if there's a cool new gadget or three, or if there are aliens. You're looking for how science will create plot. Or blow stuff up. Depending. But you are looking, and it's kind of like, if someone in a detective story waves a phone around then it might be because they're trying to call for help, or because the contacts list has important clues, or because like Sherlock you can read its history in scratch marks and deduce everything from socio-economic background to state of health of the user. If someone in science fiction is waving a phone around, the phone does something really cool.
If your readers know which genre the writer thinks they're in, then the things that are foregrounded are the things the writer intends the audience to notice. If the writer doesn't understand these reading patterns, the reader will be looking for signal in noise, and getting ever more frustrated.
Like I get frustrated trying to read the stuff we get set for lit class. Nothing happens, to people that are not very interesting. The clues are there in the lexis if you dig, but basically for the Short Story teacher if you assume it's going to be about one of isolation, alienation and ennui, you're probably half way there. And the rest is in figuring out if it's about sex or suicide (usually suicide). I don't know why she reads this stuff or what she gets out of it. She has said she doesn't get science fiction. I think we're just looking for story in different places.
So if a writer comes in from out of genre, into whatever genre, daytime medical drama or evening soaps or spy stories or romance or the one I actually understand, SF, then what they need to know is what the audience is looking for and what they're going to be looking at. And if you try and combine two genres - even unwittingly, like thinking you're going from 'normal' tv to a genre - you have to resolve any clashes or paradoxes in what the audiences are going to be reading for. You have to provide them with information in the channels they expect. Or they'll just decide you're rubbish and go away.
Genres that set up what kind of ending you can expect but use the same reading clues seem like easier mixes than ones that think the clues are in different places. But if you're mixing a romance into a science fiction story then some people are looking for clues about which guy she'll choose and some people are looking for clues about how the gadgets will save the day. Mixing that takes work.
There's also more subtle differences in shared values and prevailing ideologies. I will rapidly be wrong no matter what I say about this, because there's bazillions, but I'll have a go at an example. The contrast I have noticed in different episodes of some SF is between stories where brain matters and stories where it does not.
Like, in some stories, things happen, you look for clues, you apply rational deduction, you formulate a plan, and you do something tricksy and clever. The audience can be just as clever given the same clues. These are brain stories.
But there are other stories where things happen, things happen, things happen, boom splat pow, and you have feeeeeeelings about them, and are all ARRGH and WOW, and mostly you hang on for the ride, and when it rolls to a stop you realise the most useful quality for survival in that world is nothing to do with brains, it's just endurance. Like the kind of detective story where you figure out who the bad guy is by surviving all the attempts to kill you. The deduction is process of elimination, and persistence is going to win the day. These are not so much brain stories.
Different people like them. Personally I like applying brain to problem and the idea that thinking about things can lead to making things better. So I may misdescribe the favourite stories of other teams.
I'm sure there's people who think it's about heart vs brain, and how caring is more important than being tricksy. But I tend to think that caring is inadequate until you figure out something useful to do about it, and all that Use The Force bit and Trust Your Feelings tends to annoy me a little these days, because that's not even about heart, that's about saying the world is easier to deal with if you put the blast shield down, and really, no. I wouldn't want a Jedi to drive a bus, you know? Faith is no replacement for looking.
Or, to skip discourses entirely, you need wisdom and compassion both. But that's a whole other set of stories.
SO, anyway, if you're packaging a story to appeal to a crowd that favours one set of survival strategies, they will respond to stories turning into the other set as if they've just been told they're Doing It Wrong.
There are many ways to make your audience turn off, but laughing at them and at the idea of the story the believe they're watching is quite high up on the list.
So genre is a long history of texts to reference, that will have built patterns and expectations and a shorthand the reader is drawing on. But it is also a set of writing and reading tools, techniques that foreground different aspects, and ways of approaching decoding the story. If you approach a new genre without familiarising yourself with all that, you're just not going to be communicating what you think you're saying, let alone giving the experience your readers thought the packaging promised.
If a writer thinks they can somehow walk into a genre, pick up on whichever tropes have caught their eye, and otherwise have a clean sheet to start from... language doesn't work like that. Not at the word sized unit, and very much not at the level of story.
We're all working on palimpsests, and we need to understand what we're overwriting.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-25 07:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 02:33 am (UTC)the palimpsests stuff is from lots of college lessons, so I'd hope it's getting known, but the specific application to genre could be more stressed.
don't know where that audience would be, to get it to them.