My favorite genre of book is fiction: fantasy, science fiction, sometime the occasional historical fiction, young adult, adult, even children's books. I love going to new places and incredible worlds, reading about adventures and romances and dramas and magic. There's a great quote that sums it up for me utterly, by Mason Cooley:
"Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are."
As such, I love to write what I read. My personal genre is young adult fiction. I also love high fantasy. Tolkien is my hero. Science fiction is great. Don't get me started on Ursula K. Le Guin or Isaac Asimov or Lois McMaster Bujold. If you've never read anything by those authors, stop what you're doing right now and get a book. Your world will be changed.
But today's blog post isn't about what kind of genre you like. It's about what genre you should write. And the answer is: both.
If you're a fiction writer, you should take some time to write nonfiction. If you're a nonfiction writer, you should take some time to write fiction.
Why is this? Well, as a fiction writer, I can tell you that I don't particularly jump over the moon at the chance to read nonfiction. Memoirs, biographies, ok-- if they're about a person I'm really interested in. Like Tolkien (noticing a theme, here?). But on the whole you won't find me in the nonfiction section at the book store or the library. I definitely prefer Narnia to World War II.
But writing against your genre is a great way to expand your own writing style. For instance, in nonfiction you can really get characterization and details down strong. You can work on description, on dialogue, and on setting as well as inner constructs. Why is that so much better practice than doing the same thing in fiction? Because with nonfiction it's real. And being honest with yourself or with others is very hard. If you can do that, you can create fiction characters and fiction places. It's like taking a figure drawing class. If you can draw the model or the still-life, you can use that knowledge to later draw from your own mind.
You learn to be real. You learn to pay attention to what you can see around you, to the concrete details that are more than fairy dust and dragons' wings.
At the same time, all you nonfiction writers-- you need to practice writing fiction. Stretch your imagination. Just because it isn't real or isn't yet feasible doesn't mean it couldn't be. Use the knowledge you have of the real world to create a world that is unreal. That's how the original masters of hard science fiction did it. They were scientists, physicists, astrophysicists, engineers, etc. They knew what was possible and therefore stretched the limits of what could be possible. And if you read some of the very early science fiction, many of them were even prophetic in nature.
Nonfiction teaches you how to look. Fiction teaches you how to look beyond. Both, I think, are important.
I have taken many writing classes in my collegiate time, and dabbled in many different stories and writing styles for over a decade. I took a fiction writing class early on; now I am taking a nonfiction writing class. It is helping my writing substantially. I am learning how to express the real in conjunction with the fantastical way I view the world. It is forcing me to be concrete and literal rather than enthusiastic with the fiction glitter, which isn't becoming in any story.
Now I am working on what I believe will be the novel to get published, for me. It's a rewritten fairy tale, done historical fiction style. The historical aspect is slight, because that's not my favorite genre, but it fits into the category of urban fantasy, which is the big craze these days. My original trilogy was high fantasy, which is an overloaded genre. Hence my venture into urban fantasy. Here I am connecting fiction and nonfiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment