haven't been around long enough to weigh in on lit fic vs. spec fic ego battles, but MFA type classmates love telling me they're dabbling in SFF, like they're picking it up on thursdays like pickleball or skiing instead of learning a field, should annoy me but it cracks me the fuck up, godspeed
Right? I was in an MFA program with a dude who was "writing sf" as was I. He kept informing the workshop that our critiques were bad because we didn't understand genre. I kept saying, "But I read a ton of sf/fantasy. I'm writing it too!" He just pretended I hadn't said anything at all.
lol holy moly, that is wild, i know that's not all MFAs but what a type of dude, if life were a tv movie i would love to watch the scene where he's reading a newspaper years later and sees your accolades/collections/novel and drops his coffee cup and it explodes in a million shards, ohhhh man
Now that guy sits in meetings and says the same thing a woman said 30 seconds ago then gets mad when he's called on it because "The ideas are the important thing, not who comes up with them."
Heh. I always wonder about the one guy I workshopped with who was busily writing libertarian end-of-the-world survivalist fantasies. He did the same thing in our weeklong workshop. However...our leader was not just lit fic, he wrote SF. He did plenty of skewering.
This is a primeval tension periodically coming to the fore, but synchronistically pairs really wells with the most recent podcast episode of "Normal Gossip": MFAs and Other Mistakes.
that must be where we get those books with extremely bog standard sf plots the authors clearly believed they invented. "You see, in my literary reimagining, there is a dystopia, but all the characters are both dull and insufferable, and they explain their politics for pages at a time."
def a type--to john's point, i'm sure some would write great sff that would knock me flat--but the person i'm thinking of never even gets as far as a dull version, just wants you to know it's a side thing that can be picked up and dropped, not a real discipline, hell i'd applaud a misfire over that
for the ones who are genuinely into it, me too, for the ones who just feel the need to declare they could do what we do too "if they wanted," not holding high hopes
Like people who look at a sweater or a painting or a website and refuse to pay the posted prices because they could do it themselves.
WELL WHY DON'T YOU THEN, PLEASE SHARE YOUR RESULTS WITH THE CLASS, FRIEND
Margaret Atwood space squid slumming tends to result in some very pedestrian approaches because without engaging in the genre you don't get to learn from what other authors have already done and readers can spot an author talking down to them from several parsecs away
I got lucky with my MFA class. They were mostly women who wrote all kinds of fiction and none of them had the lit fic vs SFF attitude. I made some good friends. I know it isn't always the case in academia and I went into it wary but It was a great learning experience.
You really gotta know your shit when it comes to writing SFF and have a good idea because SFF readers will come at you with, “Well, it’s ok, but this basic plot was done by H. R. Dunleavy in the August 1956 issue of Amazing Tales and he did it better.”
The problem with most MFA programs and SFF is that the faculty are largely readers of lit fic and often lack the background to spot weaknesses within the genre that a regular SFF reader would see right away. I read enough SFF to know that I’m not equipped to write it.
They can help with non-genre specific aspects of craft (and certainly a lot of genre writers could stand to develop some of that), but they aren’t going to recognize that your “original” idea has been done to death.
(And only tangentially related, I remember seeing on Twitter a few years back, an agent complaining about getting loads of queries for novels about people who died and had to work as grim reapers which is basically the concept of the TV show Dead Like Me.)
I would recommend just about any Zelazny story to them if they have any doubts about how literary SF can be. Ursula was great at it too, but Zelazny has always been a favorite.
I mean, there's no shortage of sff where the author goes out of their way to let you know they've read their Homer or Joyce or whatever, and that can go pretty poorly, too?
Not sure I've seen "I can write like Joyce" or "I'm banging out a lit fic novel, no prob" from sff as much, but like I said, I'm a newbie, so maybe? Either way I don't disagree that a "how hard can it be" view of other genres is not great for anybody.
That kind of thinking reminds me of adult fiction writers who would look down on children's fiction. It was an attitude of "I could do that if I wanted to, but I'm better than that."
yeah, definitely seems like it carries over to horror, YA, romance, and a number of other things too, feels as though every "genre" or "commercial" (or w/e the label is) writer has their run-ins with that type at some point
