Trending this week in Speculative Fiction: #TwilightHate

Perhaps I should have seen this coming. In a graduate class of literary fiction writers, I would certainly expect to hear my fair share of rants against Ms. Meyer, and I myself am not really a fan, but I did not expect a class of Fantasy and Science Fiction devotees to be so ardent in their dislike. Much to my surprise, I find myself coming to her defense, saying things like "she obviously knows her market" or "we can't argue with her sales," but for my students, such petty concerns don't matter. The disdain they feel comes from the heart, over-flowing in such scathing critiques as "but, Dr. Griffiths, vampires don't sparkle."

Herein lies, I think, an interesting point: my students are under the impression that there are rules for vampires. As a student not only of writing craft but of British literature, I find this interesting. After all, once Byron brought the "vampyre" into English consciousness in his Don Juan reference, it seems British writers were largely making up the rules as they went. By the time Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, he had a wealth of invented English mythology as well as the older eastern European tales to draw from, but that didn't stop him from taking some license in creating his own count, nor did Anne Rice feel bound to his rules when, a century later, she wrote her best-selling novel Interview with a Vampire. Yet, I don't hear my students lodging the same complaint about those. I don't hear them saying, "but, Dr. Griffiths, vampires aren't Egyptian."

Of course, they tell me that their problems with Meyer's novel are based in the poor quality of the writing, but push them on this issue and I'm not sure they'll be able to articulate exactly what they mean by that. Judging from some of the other books they love, I'm guessing the problem isn't language or characterization. The Hunger Games, for instance, is another high-interest, plot-driven book, but it doesn't thrill me on the level of insight and lyricism in the way that Louise Erdrich's or Toni Morrison's work routinely does.

The problem, I believe, lies in the expectations they have for the book. The problem with a vampire sparkling is not a "bad writing" problem. It shows no failure of the imagination. What it violates for my students is the idea of the monster, and therein lies the issue. Their disappointment with Twilight has everything to do with generic expectation: they are looking for horror, but what Meyer is writing is romance. A monster may not sparkle, a romantic lead can... at least, for millions of her readers, he can. Twilight haters may not want a literally dazzling lover, but Twilight fans do.

I heard a really interesting discussion of the sparkling vampires on an episode (and I wish I could remember which it was... perhaps world building?) of Writing Excuses in which podcasters Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, and Mary Robinette Kowal discussed the plausibility issues with Meyer's vampires. They pointed out that she had taken away the classic vampire weakness, a fatal sensitivity to light, and given them nothing in return, except perhaps a overwhelming sensitivity to ennui. Why, they asked, wouldn't such creatures take over the world? It's a great question, but I wonder if again it highlights the expectations of horror and other speculative fiction readers, with their insistence on plausibility in the worlds that their fiction creates, rather than those of romance readers, who ultimately want love to triumph over plausibility.

In the end, though, what I love about Writing Excuses is that they always come back to the same ideal in their writing tips: write what you feel is awesome. However much we may disagree with her artistic choice, Meyer did that for her romance and found a huge market who shared her desire. For those of us in other genres? Well, perhaps we won't be writing sparkling monsters any time soon, but if we too adhere to discovering what's awesome, perhaps we can learn something from Meyer's novel after all.

In Defense of Teaching Fantasy Writing

Speculative fiction is big in Utah. Writers Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson, Brandon Mull, Stephanie Meyer, and many, many others have all called Utah home, and most of my Advanced Fiction writers are working on fantasy novels of their own, so perhaps it is unsurprising that in my first year here, I find myself teaching a course devoted exclusively to writers of Speculative Fiction.

I'll be bold and venture this generalization: most creative writing programs in the country look down on genre fiction in general and spec fiction in particular. Most graduate programs and many undergraduate programs will discourage their young writers from "wasting their talent" on writing sci fi or fantasy novels, and they have some good reasons for this, the best being that many writing students fall back on writing flat, stereotypical characters who follow expected plot points. Teachers argue that writers of genre fiction aren't challenging their imaginative abilities by creating something wholly new.

The problem with this argument is that it ignores the same pitfalls in literary fiction. I've heard agents complain about "MFA fiction," for example, by which I suppose they mean the beautifully written novel about nothing in particular. I've heard others complain that all MFA writers write about is cancer patients or self-absorbed twenty-somethings, the stock characters of literary fiction. I don't want to denigrate my peers by implying that these stereotypes are just; they may have some grounding in fact, but they overgeneralize. However, the best literary writers break from these stereotypes to write moving stories that get at core human truths. And therein lies the problem with the argument against allowing students to write genre fiction, because I would argue that the best spec fic aspires to the same purpose of illuminating what's best and worst about humanity.

When I began prepping my spec fic writing class, I was the first to admit that I'd shunned SF for quite some time and that I had quite a lot of reading to catch up on. I had read The Hobbit, LOTR, and waaaaaay back in my youth, the original Dragonlance trilogy, but I had no idea what SF looked like now. I asked my students, friends, and colleagues to help me generate a reading list, which included Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, etc., etc., and what I quickly discovered was that my own assumptions about fantasy--and those of my colleagues--were well and truly out-moded. The best fantasy novels had long moved on from the stock character types of Dragonlance and into political dystopias with keen attention to plot. Good Omens was a romp, the voice of which kept me engaged from page one to the end. Gaiman's American Gods paired and inventive premise with an engaging literary writing style. The characters in Joe Abercrombie's Heroes were as complex and nuanced as any I'd read in literary fiction, and while I have some issues with George R.R. Martin's love of the word jackanapes and his need to cling to the phrase "game of thrones" once he'd discovered it, I can't fault his ability to offer compelling imagery or his deft juggling of multiple viewpoints over a sustained narrative.

I quickly realized too that I had read far more SF than I thought I had. Because Margaret Atwood and Neil Stephenson are often housed in the literary shelf at the bookstore, I hadn't thought of Oryx and Crake or Snowcrash when I assessed my own reading tastes as strictly literary. Acknowledging that the boundaries are far more permeable than we sometimes imagine, I quickly listed other spec fic novels: Gulliver's Travels, The Monk, The Mysteries of Udolfo, Frankenstein, Dracula, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and so on. I realized that my friend Kirsten Kaschock's brilliant novel Sleight was speculative, as were the works of Italo Calvino, Aimee Bender, Anne Carson, and Franz Kafka. In short, I realized that "speculative fiction" is a false label wrongly associated with escapism and a sort of childishness, when many current SF writers are doing far more politically and artistically important work than is commonly acknowledged.Yes, there is still a good deal of bad writing out there, but the genre is deep with quality writers and writing.

Whether the average MFA program acknowledges it or not, speculative fiction is becoming a dominant literary form, not merely a pop genre. (Perhaps I should say "again becoming" since critics now acknowledge some of the best gothic fiction as literary.) The problems students encounter in trying to write spec fiction (hackneyed characters, insufficient attention to plot structure, etc) are common to all genres of writing including literary fiction, and the world building spec fic writers must do deepens their awareness of the necessity of setting and its affect on character and plot in ways that are deeply educational. There's enough to say on this point to write a whole post, but I'll stop there for now.

Thankfully, some writing programs, such as the one I teach in, are starting to be more open-minded and accepting, but the bias is still all too present. I had it myself. I'm glad to say, my students have educated me, and I have come to know better.