Two lovely bits for you to sort through today. Take one home. Toss the other away. Or maybe keep them both for a rainy day.
Sorry. Found myself in a rhyme there somehow. Shan’t happen again. Moving on.
First is this illuminating post from yesterday by one literary agent Kristin Nelson (who is based in Denver, by the way, my home away from NYC). I got the chance to actually meet Mrs. Nelson at the last writing conference I attended earlier this year. This also afforded me the opportunity to practice me “don’t be an annoying writer who won’t leave the agents alone” skills. I think I did all right. Anyways, the posting talks about several glitches that tend to sneak into stories (also known as fatal flaws). Several of these are very common in fantasy novels, such as having entire scenes where nothing happens but your characters sitting on their butts and having a friendly ol’ chat, or also having extraneous actions scenes, or scenes where your characters do something cool just because you want to show them off to the reader, but what they do isn’t actually pertinent to the story. Whew. I just realized how long of a sentence that was.
Check the post out and be honest with yourself.
Second is this article, which actually came out last December, so if you’ve already seen it, then read it again because it’s good for you and I said so. Ursula Le Guin (and if you don’t know who she is–shame!) has a wonderful essay on why fantasy stories can be just as important for grownups as they are for children. Here is an excerpt:
“To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizeable error. Rational yet non-intellectual, moral yet inexplicit, symbolic not allegorical, fantasy is not primitive but primary. Many of its great texts are poetry, and its prose often approaches poetry in density of implication and imagery. The fantastic, the marvellous, the impossible rode the mainstream of literature from the epics and romances of the Middle Ages through Ariosto and Tasso and their imitators, to Rabelais and Spenser and beyond.”
And thus, by reading this essay, you gain a solid rebuttal against those who claim that fantasy, science fiction, and other such branches of the great tree of speculative fiction are not “real literature.” But use this power wisely, for I’m sure Ursula Le Guin won’t be all that happy if you go around bashing people over the head with the latest John Scalzi tome and yelling in their dazed faces, “Read it! It’s literature!”
Maybe if you came up with a rhyme…
I see that smile.