Fantasy as Technique

[Team 2012]

Mod note: Copied from the Magical Realism thread for context

It [magical realism] seems to have a lot to do with butterflies.

Seriously, the big clue is in the term itself (whoever coined it). Generally, personally unreal elements manifesting in the "real world".

It wouldn't be at all weird for a girl to suddenly ascend to heaven because of her beauty if she lived at Hogwarts. Or if she lived in New York, but had run into supernatural elements there that created a new shuffle of what the consensual world is all about.

But to do so in our communal, consensual world is magical.

To an extent, the same event would take on different ramifications if presented in certain genres. If it happened in a Heinlein novel it wouldn't be magical realism, would it? It would be science fiction...even if no scientific explanation was given.
(Ray Bradbury, by the way, is a master class magical realist, though he's not discussed as such and considered, for some, reason, to be a scifi writer)
If it happened in something with castles and warlocks on the cover, it would be fantasy.
If there is a shirtless man and bodice-busting girl on the cover it would become romantic and supernatural.

So what is magic realism depends to an extent on the setting and the "lens" we train on it. Which is both magical and realistic.

[Jerry Cornelius]

When I'm being especially cynical, I don't see "magical realism" as anything other than a marketing technique. I'm instantly reminded of attempts to categorise John Crowley and Samuel Delaney as "magical realist" as if to salvage them from the spurious association with straight fantasy.

[badducky]

I've always considered this a technique, not a movement.

Another sister techinque/movement I haven't seen mentioned is "surrealism".

The difficult line to draw is not between SF/F and magical real, but between surrealism and magical realism.

As a political literature, I think it is important to note that the term is utterly American. Garcia-Marquez rejects it, as do many practicioners of the "form". Magical realism is a fancy way for Western literary critics to apologize for elements of myth and whimsy in otherwise "serious" realistic literature, because in "Western" academia we over-emphasize - perhaps even fetishize - realist, everyday, occasionally turgidly self-important prose best represented by Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Chekov, and Tolstoy and others like them.

As the term was invented to separate "serious" literature of the fantastic from fairy tales and adventurist fiction, I find the term hollow and meaningless. Fairy tales and adventurist fictions are quite capable of astonishing literary depth, after all.

I prefer to think of numerous MR scribblers as mere surrealists, including Carpentier and the guy who ran for president of Peru... what was his name... Blah. Mindblank.... I prefer to think of Borges as a Speculative Fictionist. Garcia-Marquez and Gunter Grass are more like Faulkner than any of the other magical realists that supposedly share their artistic medium.

Simply defining a work of art by one writing technique is so limiting as to be laughable. to me, it has far more to do with our academic obsession with exactly one kind of "Great... American... Novel..." than with any actual categorical truth.

[Team 2012]

Well, it's certainly not a "movement" or "form", but it's pretty hard to call it a "technique".
Is fantasy a "technique"?

Genre? Sub-genre? (But sub of what?)


What makes you hear some music and say, "That's rock and roll" or "Sounds like reggae meets salsa" or "it's like swing, but with electronics"?

Any resemblance to surrealism is pretty superficial, no? Different motivation entirely. And not speculative by any stretch. That's one of the things that sets it apart, there's no speculation: an exhumed coffin releases a flush of hummingbirds and the people accept it.

[badducky]

Well, it's certainly not a "movement" or "form", but it's pretty hard to call it a "technique".
Is fantasy a "technique"?

Actually, that's exactly what fantasy is.

When people say "Fantasy" or "Science fiction" they're actually referring to adventurist literature, inspired by the pulp adventure books, that utilize the stylistic techniques of "fantasy" or "science fiction" in what is, fundamentally, an adventure narrative.

The reason "Urban fantasy" is an adventurist book is about the form of the narrative, where the primary motivation is the entertainment generated by the exciting events.

It's still an art form, and capable of great literary invention. "Against The Day" is an adventurist novel, as is "American Gods".

[badducky]

The reason, by the way, that MR is nothing like Urban Fantasy, has more to do with the dilineation between Adventure Fiction and Literary Fiction.

I hate using the term "Literary", but at the moment, it's the only term I know to use to distiinguish the two, though the unintended implication of quality granted by the term "literary" is incorrect and certainly not intended.

[Shweta]

When I'm being especially cynical, I don't see "magical realism" as anything other than a marketing technique. I'm instantly reminded of attempts to categorise John Crowley and Samuel Delaney as "magical realist" as if to salvage them from the spurious association with straight fantasy.

Many things are nabbed by marketing departments in this way, but that doesn't make them only that. Yes, sure, there's a marketing technique of using magical realism. That doesn't restrict magical realism itself, however, and the side that isn't marketing is a lot more relevant to us :)



Toothpaste -- my only issue with your definition was that it risks restricting Urban Fantasy to The Genre That Is No Longer Called Paranormal-Romance, which is a limitation I object to hugely on principle. So if my annoyance was coming through, apologies -- it was not with anything you're actually saying about MR, but with the crowds of people who seem not to know that Urban Fantasy existed before Paranormal Romance got renamed, and it was a label for different and interesting work :)

I really like this conversation, overall, I just think we need to be careful anytime we say "Well it's not just X, because X is limited in these ways", not to undersell X.

On the same topic, badducky, I think you're underselling fantasy and science fiction by placing restrictions on them that don't always apply :)
I'd agree your definitions work -- most of the time. But - for example - I'd have a lot of trouble seeing Butler's Kindred as adventurist, though it's clearly fantasy. I'd have a lot of trouble seeing Delaney as adventurist, too, or Karen Joy Fowler, or many of the Tiptree winners. Both SF and fantasy do cross the pulp/lit line, (IMO especially at the short fiction level, but also in long form).

[badducky]

Ah, Shweta, but the application of the technique of fantasy or science fiction does not require adventurist prose.

Marketing distinctions in bookstores and academic distinctions for useful debate are not equal entities.

[Shweta]

Ah, Shweta, but the application of the technique of fantasy or science fiction does not require adventurist prose.

Marketing distinctions in bookstores and academic distinctions for useful debate are not equal entities.
Sure, but I'm saying at least some applications of the techniques of sf/f on literary prose are still sold as sf/f. They're not necessarily Suddenly Something Different.

And I'd call each of those a cluster of techniques/presuppositions, rather than a single blanket technique, but that's a quibble :)

[badducky]

I agree with your quibble completely, but I didn't feel like talking about continuums of influence and the ultimate meaninglessness of terms inside both marketing and academics when the cluster of influences that create different works of art can be so divergent from author to author inside the same supposed "movement", technique, or genre.

[Shweta]

I agree with your quibble completely, but I didn't feel like talking about continuums of influence and the ultimate meaninglessness of terms inside both marketing and academics when the cluster of influences that create different works of art can be so divergent from author to author inside the same supposed "movement", technique, or genre.
Don't get me started on category structure :)

[Team 2012]

Actually, that's exactly what fantasy is.

Sorry to take exception, but that is NOT "technique". Frankly, it would be hard to see much in fiction writing as "technique", in the sense that a ballerina or juggler or violinist or rock climber has technique.

But when you talk about fantasy you are talking about style, trappings, gesture, a lot of things contribute. But certainly not technique. There is nothing technical about hanging butterflies around.

So, please forgive, but there isn't really an "actually exactly" here. What you are saying is an opinion, and a very, very minority one in the world of letters. Which is considered kind of cool here on the team, frankly. But not the stuff with which to flatly contradict. Others also have opinions.

[Shweta]

Perhaps you guys should define your terms? So far your disagreement sounds to me like it's rooted more in the terminology than in substantive differences of opinions.

If I'm wrong and you have a real disagreement, of course, that's interesting and I'd like to know what it is :D


:popcorn:

[badducky]

You use ballerina, rock climber, etc to talk about the difference in technique. That's misleading.

Compare, instead violinist to violinist. What is the difference between a country fiddler and a rock electric violinist and a classical musician?

In the specific case of violinists there is a thing about what kind of repertoire they have. As writing is generally not a performance art in the same sort of way, I dismiss that completely.

The technique of a fiddler is the difference between the actual musical creation of a fiddled country riff versus a rockin' electro-punk riff and the musical phrase of a symphony orchestra.

Fantasy is a technique, that can be mastered. It can be applied to other narrative structures. The same is true of science fiction, mystery, academically/literary, etc.

I think the notion that this is a minority opinion is a disingenious way of dismissing something I learned from others, by the way.

The interstitial movement oft' takes those techniques and blurs them, or places them on top of narrative structures not generally associated with the technique.

[Shweta]

Compare, instead violinist to violinist. What is the difference between a country fiddler and a rock electric violinist and a classical musician?

I think this is an interesting take, and pretty consistent with my general take on genre as conversation/culture. Technique comes from who you're listening to/reading, after all, as well as what you're trying to accomplish.

I don't think either this or my way is the only useful way of seeing it, but that's another matter again :)

I'd still like to see a definition of technique, and of what you'd say fits into that -- is it merely the way the words order themselves into sentences? Some people might say that. Is it the way plots can go, the sorts of character interaction one focuses on, the general toolkit?

[Dawnstorm]

Compare, instead violinist to violinist. What is the difference between a country fiddler and a rock electric violinist and a classical musician?

Actually, I'd argue that the "violinist" is the actor you hire for your audio book. You provide the sheet music. Writing is not a performing art, and there's only so much you can do to influence a reading. Any text is inherently incomplete until it's read. Same as sheet music, really.

[Shweta]

Actually, I'd argue that the "violinist" is the actor you hire for your audio book. You provide the sheet music. Writing is not a performing art, and there's only so much you can do to influence a reading. Any text is inherently incomplete until it's read. Same as sheet music, really.

You may be reading this as a much more direct analogy than I am.

I see it this way: the fiddler, the classical violinist, and the whateverelse all have the same instrument (analogous to language for the writer) but learn to approach that instrument differently and think about what they're doing with it differently, based on training, practice, and general familiarity with others doing similar things.

Take that abstraction out and look at specific instances of performance and yes, there are too many differences to draw the analogy, but I think it's still there. Just not where you're looking :)

[Team 2012]

The term "technique" already has a definition, actually.

Violinists, ballerinas, rock climbers, painters, etc spend hours drilling in muscle memory, perfecting the way they manipulate and contact. That's what technique is. There just isn't any real parallel to that for writing.

Thank God


The idea of comparing musicians who work different genres, however is a good one, and lllustrates the point. There aren't really a whole lot of different techniques involved. A little variation, but nothing compared to the whole harrowing business of putting the fingers down in in exactly the right place, moving the bow seamlessly, all that rote practiced stuff. The difference between two genres is one of style, gesture, imagry, etc. Nothing technical about it.

Not that it's a big deal to the discussion of magical realism. Which is a state of mind, more than anything.

[badducky]

Fantasy is a mental muscle memory, a series of comfortable modes one becomes familiar in.

And, it is learned.

[Shweta]

but in the meantime, personally, I'm becoming less convinced by either of you with every post. Your words sound nice, but you're neither of you grounding them in specifics that would let them mean much.

If this is actually a discussion you want to have, rather than a contest of nice-sounding phrases, then please define your terms. We can't have a real meeting across genres and areas of specialization unless you do.

The term "technique" already has a definition, actually.

It has several. "Learned muscle memory" is really only one possibility out of many. Or visual artists would not have techniques. Engineers would not have techniques. And they do.

It would be good to know which definition or subset of definitions you were using, and claiming that there is "a definition" does not help matters.

The idea of comparing musicians who work different genres, however is a good one, and lllustrates the point. There aren't really a whole lot of different techniques involved. A little variation, but nothing compared to the whole harrowing business of putting the fingers down in in exactly the right place, moving the bow seamlessly, all that rote practiced stuff. The difference between two genres is one of style, gesture, imagry, etc. Nothing technical about it.

Actually, if you look at truly different types of music -- like for example Indian classical and Western classical violin -- there are distinctly different muscle memory patterns involved.

And depending on your definition of technique, certainly different styles have different techniques. You're not ornamenting Celtic fiddle the same way you are baroque music, and trying to use the same pattern of note shifts on both is just silly. Going from the subdominant to the tonic is a technique to give music a sense of closure, regardless of the particular muscles associated with doing so. It is in some definitions the same technique whether you do so on the piano or the violin or the tromboon.

It is in this sense that I was interpreting Ducky's use of "technique", but then this gave me pause:

Fantasy is a mental muscle memory, a series of comfortable modes one becomes familiar in.

And, it is learned.

:Wha:
This is maddeningly vague. :rant:
It sounds really nice, but could mean so many different things that it doesn't mean anything.

[badducky]

Sent from my iPhone...

You go to Clarion to learn how to wrap your mind around the form of SF/F. No structure or ornamentation is natural. Requires repetition to bend your mental muscles around the pathways of the structure, and reading to bend the mental muscles around the structures of the technique/form.

Shweta we're on the same page.

[Shweta]

Sent from my iPhone...

You go to Clarion to learn how to wrap your mind around the form of SF/F. No structure or ornamentation is natural. Requires repetition to bend your mental muscles around the pathways of the structure, and reading to bend the mental muscles around the structures of the technique/form.

Shweta we're on the same page.

We might well be! Thing is, I cannot tell quite what your page is from your words. That's my issue.
By mental muscles do you just mean learned patterns of thinking?

(Also, talking to a cognitive scientist about mental muscles is like talking to one about phrenology.)

[Dawnstorm]

You may be reading this as a much more direct analogy than I am.

I see it this way: the fiddler, the classical violinist, and the whateverelse all have the same instrument (analogous to language for the writer) but learn to approach that instrument differently and think about what they're doing with it differently, based on training, practice, and general familiarity with others doing similar things.

Take that abstraction out and look at specific instances of performance and yes, there are too many differences to draw the analogy, but I think it's still there. Just not where you're looking :)

Heh, you're probably right. Analogies, if they're not frightfully close, tend to confuse me more than help me understand. Do you know those picture-thingies that look like colourful patterns, but if you stare long enough at them they turn into a picture? For me they turn into a headache. And remain colourful patterns.

Interestingly, figurative language doesn't give me problems in fiction...

***

Highlight: "...all have the same instrument (analogous to language for the writer)..."

My problem's here. Many of the techniques (term?) a writer uses aren't concerned primarily language based. For example, I could plot a story entirely through storyboarding (if I were the visual type, which I'm not). Also, I find most of my characterisation is pre-lignual: for example, I noticed that I can often answer questions about my characters even if I don't remember ever thinking about these aspects of their lives. (I've filled out online quizzes for my characters. It's fun, and not hard at all; although, since I'm writing fantasy or SF, some of the questions baffle them.)

Incidently, from time to time my "word-capacity" fills up, and then I become word-weary. I can't write, I can't read; I'm slow to respond to people when they talk to me, and I have trouble of listening in the first place. Usually, these are the times when music works best for me. The sounds just flow along and are themselves and have no referential meaning; they just do within me whatever it is they do. And it's different from words.

Introducing lyrics is a good way for me to get rid of word-wearieness.

Maybe this also sheds light on why a music analogy gives me trouble when I think of writing. These two artforms are almost opposites the way I experience them.

Anyway, I'm not sure what this has to do with 'techniques', much less with magical realism. Except maybe that magical realism feels closer to music than, say, Fantasy or Science Fiction...

Strange thought. :Shrug:

[Shweta]

Highlight: "...all have the same instrument (analogous to language for the writer)..."

My problem's here. Many of the techniques (term?) a writer uses aren't concerned primarily language based. For example, I could plot a story entirely through storyboarding (if I were the visual type, which I'm not). Also, I find most of my characterisation is pre-lignual: for example, I noticed that I can often answer questions about my characters even if I don't remember ever thinking about these aspects of their lives. (I've filled out online quizzes for my characters. It's fun, and not hard at all; although, since I'm writing fantasy or SF, some of the questions baffle them.)

Course, I tend to think far more is both linguistic and conceptual than most linguists do :)
And this has wandered from MR; I'll split thread if Sharon doesn't get to it first. But for now, sleeps.

[badducky]

Mod powers are both magic and real.

[Team 2012]

Fantasy is a mental muscle memory,

Ah. Okay, I will not trouble you with any further argument.

[Team 2012]

Because actually, Fantasy is a balletic rockclimb up ice sculpture dribbling soccer balls with a kazoo.
You just have to know where to look.

[badducky]

Because actually, Fantasy is a balletic rockclimb up ice sculpture dribbling soccer balls with a kazoo.
You just have to know where to look.

Right. Because you don't agree with something it's absurd.

I explained my answer when Shweta suggested my quick iPhone response was vague.

[Sharon Mock]

Split from the Magical Realism thread. Have at it, just keep in mind that whole Respect Your Fellow Writer principle. Not that I think anybody has crossed that particular line.

Technique seems to be tripping people up. I wonder if what badducky's getting at is something closer to rhetoric -- as in Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy, which I haven't read. But I hesitate to pull this discussion even further into the academic...

And Dawnstorm, I also get tired of the "sound" of my own "voice" when I'm approaching burnout. So you're not alone.

[Shweta]

Split from the Magical Realism thread. Have at it, just keep in mind that whole Respect Your Fellow Writer principle. Not that I think anybody has crossed that particular line.

Thanks, lady of rockingness :Hug2:

I'd add, snarking at someone one is arguing with is not really productive even if it doesn't cross that line. It tends to kill the discussion.

[Ruv Draba]

When people tell me that writing 'isn't' a performance art, I tell them: try writing to a tight deadline. For example, try writing a competitive tender that captures both the ideas and spirit of what you're offering to do, for readers you've never met, with biases and prejudices you can't guess and needs you can only half-understand, amid a field of forty other contenders all of whom will be submitting alongside you in exactly ninety minutes time. I'm a musician, a fiction writer and a consultant and I can tell you that writing tenders to tight deadlines is every bit as much a performance art as getting up to play blues in a jam session. :D

Fantasy-the-genre draws from a palette of technique. I don't know of any technique that you can't use in fantasy. But one element fantasy must contain somewhere (by definition) is whimsy. The whimsy might be a motif (e.g. in epic fantasies), or it might be sporadic (e.g. in Sword and Sorcery), or it might be localised and almost incidental (e.g. in magical realism).

Fantasy-the-genre also has very broad agreement on topics of concern. Fantasists love working with morality and psychology and society, because whimsy works so well with those concerns. They may take an adventurous line (as with epic fantasies, sword and sorcery), or a political line (Shweta mentioned Left Hand of Darkness) or a religious line (e.g. many parables) or some combination. But the balance of adventure and ideological attack has always been in the hands of the individual author, not the genre. Fantasy the genre is promiscuous and permissive. If the bookshelves happen to be full of romantic, whimsy-laden adventures, that's a sociological observation, not a limit of the craft. If Spanish-speaking fantasists prefer not to sit at the same table with English-speaking adventurists then I'd say that this too is a sociological preference and somewhat contrived -- they may not be eating at the same table, but they're certainly reading each others' material, and more than that -- drawing from the same root mythic stock. :)

[And if you think that 'magical realism' techniques are a 20th century invention I'd invite you to consider: tales of humans receiving wisdom from animals who have no other magical power than the ability to talk, pre-date written language. The use of otherwise-ordinary talking animals to satirise politics and society pre-dates the Romans and Greeks.]

[Dawnstorm]

When people tell me that writing 'isn't' a performance art, I tell them: try writing to a tight deadline. For example, try writing a competitive tender that captures both the ideas and spirit of what you're offering to do, for readers you've never met, with biases and prejudices you can't guess and needs you can only half-understand, amid a field of forty other contenders all of whom will be submitting alongside you in exactly ninety minutes time. I'm a musician, a fiction writer and a consultant and I can tell you that writing tenders to tight deadlines is every bit as much a performance art as getting up to play blues in a jam session. :D

Terminology again, eh?

***

A Short History of Performance Writing

There was a time when the bulk of a writer's income derived from book sales, rather than writing gigs. There were no pen halls, no live writing sites (neither web-cams nor the "growing-file" variety). It boggles the mind how people could have left the exciting process of text creation unmined for so long. So: no gigs, but also no royalty check from other writers writing your own stories live.

The history of writing has been treated elsewhere in detail, most notably by Marxist critics who - needless to say - focus on the means of production. Melvyn (2071; 2073a, b) detailed the "three stages of writing" as an history of alienation, differentiating the process and making the story teller ever more dependent on external resources, and thus alientating the story teller from his intellectual capital.

The first stage Melvyn (2073a) calls "the age of story tellers". Story tellers transmit their stories orally. Very often, the stories originate from their own lives, their own experiences. Various forms of "story tellers" exist, from village elders, to bards.

The next stage Melvyn (ibid.) calls "the age of the author". This marks a transition from the oral to the written, and an obsession with "origin". This stage is product-centered. There is a text, and responsibility for the contents is assigned to a specific person, called the author. Fiction, as opposed to history, flourish in this stage, and brings along the diversification of "story teller" into "author" (responsible for the text) and "narrator" (responsible for the truth value of the text).

Importantly, cheap reproduction technologies and the spread of literacy allowed a select few people to reach a huge audience. Mechanisms of competition set in that are based on the formal criteria of the "book" rather than on "the physical availability of a story teller".

The production of books introduces the idea of "publishing", further splitting the responsibility for the text. An author was no longer only "risking his own neck".

The third stage Melvyn (ibid.) calls the "age of the writer". Electronic technologies available to everyone allowed for new ways of dissemination of information. At first, writers shared information amongst each other about writing techniques, sharing drafts of texts at various levels of completion. In the late parts of the 20th and early parts of this century, the tenor of the "sharing" was still "product centered" rather than "process centered". People wanted to "improve" the text, thus making available to the public texts that were perceived as suboptimal.

Sometime in the 2020ies write-ins became popular on the internet. These were sites that allowed readers to follow the creation of a text, letter for letter, in real-time. Just as the story teller had diversified into "aouthor" and "narrator", the "author" now has diversified into "originator" and "writer". Attempts at reality shows remained largely unsuccessful, mostly as the big studios did not understand "soul voyeurism" as well as they understood "body objectification".

The first physical write-in had more in common with open-mic nights, but took the structure of a game of chess, with screens hooked to the writer's computer, letting a small audience follow the creation of the text on-screen, while also being able to see the writer in person. Similar events had writers listen to inspirational music, which many see as the beginning of today's show-time aspects.

In 2028, an event marks the final splitting off of the writer from the author in the famous: "Belgin Writes Asimov," where Andrew Belgin, wrapped in tinfoil, re-wrote Asimov's famous novel I, Robot. This whimsical low budget event was meant to be a joke, as Belgin later admitted, but had many imitators, with writers dressing up as other writers and writing novels they could have written but never did.

The original Worthington's, then a regular café hosting Thrusday write-ins, began its success story with Tracy Felburn dressing up as a writing squid, light-penning three stories simultaneously. The three stories were, of course, prerecorded and played back simultaneously on three separate screens. This marked the beginning of writing choreography.

Meanwhile, realtime writing went on, but writers subverted the authenticity of the process of writing with pre-planned and scripted "mini-events", such as staged typos, most of the time for sheer humorous effect. However, who could forget Ashley vs. Rhodes, where Rhodes successfully claimed that, however planned, a typo did not constitute a statement, and thus could not be construed as slander.

We still are in this stage. The prominent trend these days, the Historic Realist movement, is in sharp contrast to what they label "shy-guy writers" (traditional, product-centered originators, selling nothing but the text and its layout). While the Historic Realist movement tries to recreate the private atmosphere of what they imagine a 20th Century writing life must have looked like, the "shy-guy writers" criticise them for confusing privacy with comfort (they claim, for example, no writer would write with nothing but a towel wrapped around their midriff; they are far more likely to wear a gown, or go completely naked, as the need to keep a towel in place is an unwanted distraction).

On the whole, ticket sales are declining, and, clearly, pen houses have never drawn the crowds that concert halls have. But performance writing continues to go strong, and to give rise to new and exciting concepts. I am particularly intigued by the up and coming authenticity movement, who employ such techniques as "overdeleting" (accidently deleting too much and then either hitting undo and deleting again, or re-typing the accidentally deleted content) and "screen staring" (stretches of time where no writing takes place at all - the writer does not actually have to stare at the screen).

Still, it is important to emphasise that non-performance or product-centered writing is not a thing of the past. It may surprise you to hear that more than 70 % of all writers hire actors to do their public write-ins - using not only psudonyms but also pseudosomata. Product-centered writing is still the norm for most serious non-fiction. This article, however, is also available in various video formats from Worthington's online store.

***

Sorry, couldn't resist derailing the split-off thread, but, well... I hope you now know why I don't tend to put the label "performance art" on writing. ;)

[Ruv Draba]

Sorry, couldn't resist derailing the split-off thread, but, well... I hope you now know why I don't tend to put the label "performance art" on writing. ;):D:D:D Or presumably the studio recording of music, if it involves any significant post-production editing. Or cinema if it involves CGI. Oh, and of course animations -- because the 'voice talents' are just reading from scripts and can rehearse endlessly. Animation is really no different from flicking the pages of a graphic novel really fast. And wait -- you can't see them reading it -- maybe it wasn't even them! :eek:

In short, I think that there's performance involved (though not necessarily entertainment) whenever the recipient has some interaction (which often happens in bid-writing, and some kinds of cooking, for instance), or whenever there's time-critical orchestration of contribution (as in music, but also in bid-writing and many kinds of cooking). The recipient may not experience the whole performance, but if the recipient knows that the creator is creating to their specification (say) in a time-critical fashion and perhaps sees them interacting with them along the way, then I believe that they will perceive the product as the result of performance and not simply process. Certainly, as a consultant who has worked on both sides of the bid process, I have noticed that clients judge the performer and not just the product on a bid. Some editors working with writers to a deadline might feel the same.

[Dawnstorm]

Again, I think we're just using different terms, and I'm not sure why that matters. To me performance art means that the process of the performance is what call the art. "Performance art" needs something to "perform", and that something is produced by non-performance art:

Or presumably the studio recording of music, if it involves any significant post-production editing.

The song-writing is not a performance art. The playing of instruments and singing is a performance art. The editing and production of the soundtrack is not a perfomance art.

Or cinema if it involves CGI.

There are so many different artistic (and non-artistic) activities in cinema that I can't really comment on it. I can't think of any performance art in CGI, though, unless you count the guy who wears the diodes in motion capturing (I suspect this is usually not very artistic, though I don't know anything about that process, and though I admit that there must be a modicum of individual expression at the bottom of it).

Oh, and of course animations -- because the 'voice talents' are just reading from scripts and can rehearse endlessly.

The "voice talents" in animation are always performance art. How much you rehearse, or if you only choose best takes doesn't matter much (but the choosing itself is - like the editing in music recording - not a performance art).

Animation is really no different from flicking the pages of a graphic novel really fast. And wait -- you can't see them reading it -- maybe it wasn't even them!

Lol! But animation itself is not a performance art. Neither the drawing nor the arranging of the piccies.

Basically, I call "performance art" when the manner and expression of the process is the subject of the art. If writing were a performance art, there (a) would be no other product to it than the process of writing, and (b) we wouldn't classify writing according to text-type, but according to production type (e.g. a typist would be a different artist from a hand-writer, and both would be radically different to a user of a tape-recorder and/or secretary).

This may or may not be a different as an approach from this:

In short, I think that there's performance involved (though not necessarily entertainment) whenever the recipient has some interaction (which often happens in bid-writing, and some kinds of cooking, for instance), or whenever there's time-critical orchestration of contribution (as in music, but also in bid-writing and many kinds of cooking). The recipient may not experience the whole performance, but if the recipient knows that the creator is creating to their specification (say) in a time-critical fashion and perhaps sees them interacting with them along the way, then I believe that they will perceive the product as the result of performance and not simply process. Certainly, as a consultant who has worked on both sides of the bid process, I have noticed that clients judge the performer and not just the product on a bid. Some editors working with writers to a deadline might feel the same.

The problem I have here is that you seem to start your definitions or usage at a rather complex level. I, on the other hand, have already classified the activity as performance- or product-art before I know whether there's interaction or time-constraint. For example, cooking is not a performance art, because what matters is not the aesthetics of wielding a pan, but the resultant meal. However, in the production of a cooking show, the presentation becomes some sort of "acting", which is a performance art. But if you have no time or not enough information to script what you're going to say in advance, the interaction-part of a cooking show is not only a performance art, because you also come up with responses on the spot, which is a product-art (in the sense that other actors can repeat what you did in different ways).

Apart from starting with the definition at different levels, I also sense a word-confusion. There are at least two meanings of "perform" I can detect:

1. "to perform X" - which is what I'm using. A singer performs a song. An actor performs a character role. A writer performs nothing; rather s/he produces content to be performed.

This sense of "performance" is probably involved in the "interaction" part of your usage. I perform an interaction role - one that I script as I go along.

2. "to perform + adjective that evaluates efficiency": You perform well or poorly on a test. I tend to think of this sense of "performance", when I read about bids or time restraints. To perform, then, is to make the most out of your resources in a minimum of time, but that's quite different from 1. I'm not talking about efficiency at all.

To me the distinction of "performance-art" and "product-art" can be defined as slots in the transitive "perform". If your performance of X matters, it's "performance art"; if your X is being performed, it's product art (provided that X is artistic in the first place - a highly expressive reading of the telephone register does not make the telephone register art; just the reading of it).

Clearly, this is a highly analytic way of looking at things. Take a jam session in Jazz, where people improvise over a theme with certain stritucres and a great amount of freedom. Your certainly performing something on your instrument. You're performing X. But X is not a finished product; you're filling very huge blank spots as you go; the strictures are often merely there to help you play with others. This is a highly complicated social process, since you all react to each other and nobody comes up with the final product on their own.

What we have here, I think, is a sliding scale of freedom in expression: How strict is X? How much input from the performer (in completing X) does X allow?

Analytically speaking, alterations of X are not "performance": So if the playwrite writes "I will come tomorrow," but the actor says "I'll come tomorrow," the actor has - in effect - amended the script. However, there are many ways to phrase "I will come tomorrow." The line has to be phrased in some way. Anything that has to do with these questions, the questions that X leaves unanswered, goes into the preparation of the performance, with the performance then being judged against the vision established beforehand.

Improvisation collapses all these activities - amending, preparing, performing - into one activity, which makes typologies hard. No big problem to the artist; they do what they do. But theory geeks like me are all over this.

Now you can also improvise a short story, rather than music at a jam session. I've done so. I could improvise a short story with input from others as I go, I suppose (though I'm not too good under a spotlight). Yes, this activity includes an amount of performance on my part, but what I'm performing is a social role and not the short story, which is the result of my improvisation. This is crucially different from a jam session, where the way I tilt my hand influences the sound I produce and changes my artistic contribution. If I improvise my short story the way I tilt my hand may influence the legibility of the script, but it's all in the words. Unlike in a jam session, there's a disjunct between what I'm performing (a social role) and what I'm producing (a short story).

I think you might have realised by now that to make sense of theory I need very analytic terms: very small and very precise small things that add up to very big and very complex and terribly confusing big things. I hope I did explain (a) what I mean by the terms I use, and (b) where I'm confused about how you use the same the terms (mostly with regards to the two different meanings of "performance" I'm torn between when reading your posts).

[Ruv Draba]

Again, I think we're just using different terms, and I'm not sure why that matters.I believe that you're using an audience-centric perspective in which the 'value' of the work relates to where the audience perceives that the 'entertainment' resides.

I'm using a perspective based on the crafting of the work. In this the 'value' of the work is often shaped by the artist's endeavours to align the work with perception of audience need. The audience's perception of value meanwhile is an alloy of 'product', 'process' and 'engagement'. DJs, chefs who improvise dishes for specific guests and jazz musicians understand this -- and so do certain kinds of writers. Although I understand the first usage (and think it the more common and accepted) as a crafter I prefer the other usage for the following reason...

Writing is not a performance art, thank God.
This perception is common, but ignores certain kinds of writing. Roleplayers, oral story-crafters, commercial and copy-writers who write to spec with intensive client involvement may immediately understand what I mean. ;)

Dawny, you've sought to distinguish 'perform a task' from 'perform a work' and used efficiency to separate those usages. In practice I think they're cognate. They're the same word with the same roots (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=perform&searchmode=none), deriving from words (par+fornir) meaning 'to finish, accomplish, carry out'. That sense applies to both art and process. In both cases, performance is the delivery of effect. Efficiency counts, but so does outcome.

A more accurate statement may be 'Writing isn't a performance art for me, thank God.' But that also makes me want to issue the challenge: 'Why not? Don't you care about using your best creative endeavours to accomplish a specific outcome in a designated period of time?'

Thought about that way, many writers may be performers even when they don't realise it.

But maybe you insist that performance is all about audience engagement. Well, please consider the following piece of clownish spruiker boilerplate by Neil Gaiman then:
Neil Gaiman is a messy-haired white male author trapped in the body of an identical white male author with perhaps even less-tidy hair. His books and comics have won many awards. He thanks you for your offer of a comb but does not believe it would do any good. Despite being English, he lives more in America than he does anywhere else in the world, and is currently somewhere in his mid-forties. He wrote this book especially for you.
[Since when is showmanship other than performance? :)]

[Higgins]

I believe that you're using an audience-centric perspective in which the 'value' of the work relates to where the audience perceives that the 'entertainment' resides.



Performances aim at producing a certain range of effects, moreover they generally belong to some genre or other so that the audience knows what to expect. So in a way even performances aren't entirely explainable as performances, ie they, like texts, are generically structured, syntactically ordered objects or sets of events with a series of aims. I think this is what Team2012 was insisting on: the aim, the point, the effect of a work or even of a work of fantasy. It (ie the aim or point or intended effect) may indeed be more central to what is going on in a work of fantasy than the performance or the technique.

[Ruv Draba]

Performances aim at producing a certain range of effects, moreover they generally belong to some genre or other so that the audience knows what to expect. So in a way even performances aren't entirely explainable as performances, ie they, like texts, are generically structured, syntactically ordered objects or sets of events with a series of aims. I think this is what Team2012 was insisting on: the aim, the point, the effect of a work or even of a work of fantasy. It (ie the aim or point or intended effect) may indeed be more central to what is going on in a work of fantasy than the performance or the technique.Yes. Though some artists like to obscure the structure of their performance until the audience experiences it, there's usually some tacit understanding of what the audience is invited to appreciate.

I think it's difficult to extend that thought to the 'point' of fantasy (or indeed any other fiction category), though. Even writers who identify as fantasists won't agree that they have a shared point in the use of whimsical imagery or fantastical premises. C.S. Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, Guy Gavriel Kay and China Mieville would probably give us very different accounts of what the whimsy in their fantasy is meant to do -- because they employ their whimsy in very different ways.

To suggest that fantasists should have a common point in fantasy technique is to impose arbitrary external sociological categories on people who will probably just ignore those categories anyway. :) On the other hand, we can observe common concerns in fantasy and note from a crafting perspective that there are proven synergies between whimsical treatments and the exploration of certain concerns in fiction.

[Dawnstorm]

I believe that you're using an audience-centric perspective in which the 'value' of the work relates to where the audience perceives that the 'entertainment' resides.

In a sense, you're right. I'm pragmatically starting off from the observation that we pay to see actors act and musicians play music. But we don't pay to see writers write, painters paint, or sculptors sculpt. Instead we buy books (or lectures), paintings and sculptures.

That's the extent of it. It's rather trivial at face value. I do realise that it's more complicated. Oral storytellers, as you say. Also, pavement artists. Etc.

Sometimes it's the process we're interested in, and sometimes it's the endpoint we're interested in. I call the former performence arts, and the latter... I have no fixed name for. Product art? Artifacture?

I'm using a perspective based on the crafting of the work. In this the 'value' of the work is often shaped by the artist's endeavours to align the work with perception of audience need. The audience's perception of value meanwhile is an alloy of 'product', 'process' and 'engagement'. DJs, chefs who improvise dishes for specific guests and jazz musicians understand this -- and so do certain kinds of writers. Although I understand the first usage (and think it the more common and accepted) as a crafter I prefer the other usage for the following reason...

I'm utterly baffled by this. Performance = adaption?

Let me try a different approach. What sort of art is not performance art? My hunch is that your answer will be irrelevant to the type of art produced, and will have more to do with the artist's attitude, but I'm not sure. Still drawing a blank here.

This perception is common, but ignores certain kinds of writing. Roleplayers, oral story-crafters, ...

I keep saying that describing what people actually do is more complex. I could write page after page using the performance/product dichotomy about oral story tellers and role players. Or - more generally - about improvisation. Since they're analytic terms, they will have their short comings, and I'll confuse myself on several occasions. But I've got something to hold on to while I try to figure things out.

commercial and copy-writers who write to spec with intensive client involvement may immediately understand what I mean. ;) ...

I'm beginning to wonder if you're even separating the product from its marketing. Yep, you dress up for your clients, you smooth-talk them (practise the tone?), let your bodylanguage tell them that they get what they want...

On the other hand, changing your mind about the direction your writing is going to take doesn't change its nature, no matter where the impulse comes from.

Dawny, you've sought to distinguish 'perform a task' from 'perform a work' and used efficiency to separate those usages. In practice I think they're cognate. They're the same word with the same roots (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=perform&searchmode=none), deriving from words (par+fornir) meaning 'to finish, accomplish, carry out'. That sense applies to both art and process. In both cases, performance is the delivery of effect. Efficiency counts, but so does outcome.

Would you believe that I knew "perform" and "perform" share the same etymology? I happen to think, though, that being cognate (in the linguistic sense of sharing an etymology) is pretty irrelevant to modern usage.

Your best line in here is that both are a "delivery of effect", but that's so abstract that it also applies to the verbs "to do", or "to act", or "to accomplish".

I'm not convinced (but I'm still unsure what I remain unconvinced of).

A more accurate statement may be 'Writing isn't a performance art for me, thank God.' But that also makes me want to issue the challenge: 'Why not? Don't you care about using your best creative endeavours to accomplish a specific outcome in a designated period of time?'

Thought about that way, many writers may be performers even when they don't realise it.

That writing isn't a performance art doesn't mean you can't put down a top performance at it. Don't be fooled by cognates. ;)

But maybe you insist that performance is all about audience engagement.

Yup. Writing as a performance is dull. The writer won't move much. By the way, which is more exciting, the click-click-clicking of a keyboard, or the scratching of a pen? I vote keyboard.

Well, please consider the following piece of clownish spruiker boilerplate by Neil Gaiman then:

...

[Since when is showmanship other than performance? :)]

Ever since people started to write it down rather than perform it? ;)

This is the old semantics tango. Always moving, going nowhere.

***

I do agree with Team that using fantasy elements is not a technique in the same way that bowing a violin is a technique. The equivalent technique to writing would be ten-finger-typing or stenography or whatever you use to write quickly to keep up with your brains. It's pretty irrelevant, though, to genre. Fantasy doesn't require a certain typing mode.

But there is a certain patterning, perhaps, something akin to a way of composing a melody, or a harmony line perhaps. I do think "Do not use parallel fifth or thirds" in composition theory is frightfully similar to "Do not use adjectives and adverbs" in writing.

This is why I think a distinction needs to be made, and I'm trying to explore the "performance" aspect that I see in musical instrument playing, but not in writing.

[Ruv Draba]

In a sense, you're right. I'm pragmatically starting off from the observation that we pay to see actors act and musicians play music. But we don't pay to see writers write, painters paint, or sculptors sculpt. Instead we buy books (or lectures), paintings and sculptures.Actually, some people pay subscription fees to play on-line roleplaying games in which, aside from some pretty but limited computer graphics, they're primarily paying to watch other writers type dialogue very slowly. :)
Sometimes it's the process we're interested in, and sometimes it's the endpoint we're interested in. I call the former performence arts, and the latter... I have no fixed name for. Product art? Artifacture?Artifacture -- love it. :D But sometimes it's both. Wasn't it Harlan Ellison who sat in the window of a department-store and wrote stories on a typewriter, pasting the pages to the department-store window? If I recall the story rightly, he was writing unedited shorts about topics requested by shoppers. I doubt that they parked him there to drive shoppers away (though if they'd had him talk to them instead of trapping him in a terrarium it might have been a different story :D).
I'm utterly baffled by this. Performance = adaption?There's a thought rattling around my head that if the process is unbound by time, interruptible and independent of audience then it's not performance. And a lot of writing is like that. But...
Let me try a different approach. What sort of art is not performance art? My hunch is that your answer will be irrelevant to the type of art produced, and will have more to do with the artist's attitude, but I'm not sure. Still drawing a blank here.You hunched correctly. :) Leaving the 'art' part aside, I see the 'performance' as to do with external accountability for process/method and all the things attached to that (time, space, coordination with other participants, direct consideration of recipients).

'Ideal' writing can be quite free from that. Both Agatha Christie and Ian McEwan have said 'I write because I don't want to work'. By that I think they mean: I have no external accountability for process, execution, other participants etc...

My counter-argument is this: just because some kinds of writing have no process-accountability doesn't mean that all kinds have none. Moreover the non-accountability has nothing to do with the product but everything to do with how you set yourself up to produce it. Hence, roleplaying, oral storytelling, bid-writing, Harlan Ellison typing in a window, interactive blog tales, staff-writing collaborations etc...

For all the ideals of solitary writers engaged in onanistic self-indulgence, writing can be (and sometimes unavoidably is) performance-driven, either by choice or necessity.
I'm beginning to wonder if you're even separating the product from its marketing. Yep, you dress up for your clients, you smooth-talk them (practise the tone?), let your bodylanguage tell them that they get what they want...Neil Gaiman clearly believes that his contribution to marketing must be integral to the product (he "wrote this story especially for you", remember? You may never have met him, but still, he did. :tongue) In cases where a writer markets a product before it's fully developed (e.g. from a synopsis or a writers-room pitch), I'd say that the demand for subsequent performance is even stronger ("How are you going? Can I see the first chapter? Can I see a partial? Can you give me some pages? How do you feel about the emerging manuscript? Can I see a treatment?").
Would you believe that I knew "perform" and "perform" share the same etymology?Readily. :) But it's a public discussion and I like to show working. Even if I'm just dividing by zero. :)
Yup. Writing as a performance is dull.Go tell Harlan and all those people spending $US5-15 per month for on-line text-based roleplay. They'll be shattered to hear that they're bored and boring. :)

[Team 2012]

Right. Because you don't agree with something it's absurd.

Actually, it's the other way around.

[Shweta]

Actually, it's the other way around.

Final warning: enough. If you must continue bickering, take it to PM.

Any more of this in-thread gets deleted.

[Team 2012]

Sorry about that. We missed previous warnings and meant no harm.

[Shweta]

It's fine, we can move on (and I know Ruv and Dawnstorm are able to withstand derails :D)

[Team 2012]

God is in the derails

[Ruv Draba]

I thought we were derailing the bickering with 'writing isn't/sometimes is/could be contrived to be performance art' side-chat?

Anyway, uh... Is so.

[Dawnstorm]

It wasn't a derail. My hypothesis is that the term technique is used differently for performance arts and ...arts (I still have no term for that). Thus to even talk to each to other we need to get our terms straight. Of course, this only works if we're on the same page with performance...

Oh...

[Ruv Draba]

Ah. Ok. Let's re-rail then...

Notionally (and for no good reason other than intuition and convenience), I divide the technicality of fiction design into:

Concern -- what the fiction is about. This picks up themes, subject, key concepts
Attack -- how this concern will be made dramatic. This covers notions of setting, premise, key characters, key conflicts, mood/tone and plot. I sometimes call this 'treatment'.
Structure -- how the drama will be organised. Any scene, sequel, intra-scene and any act structures go here.
Presentation -- the tools by which the story will be made vivid and engaging and the mood will be brought out. This picks up style, voice, order of scene presentation, dialogue and narrative choices, imagery, illustration, chapter breaks...In this view, the decision to use whimsical elements can be one of concern (e.g. you're writing about mythology or religion), one of attack or one of presentation (only the structure layer doesn't greatly care). Possible 'attack' reasons include:

I want to create a particular mood (e.g. romantic, scary, wonderous) for the story over-all and recurrent whimsy will enhance that; or
I want to disorient the reader so things won't quite be as expected; or
I can't stand the thought of writing without whimsy; I'll adapt the concerns if necessary to fit my attack.You can also inject whimsy into your presentation without ever really establishing it in your attack. Often these are done as embellishments. You sometimes see this in romantic stories say, where things turn out improbably well at the end -- yet there's no evident agency causing it. Horror stories sometimes do this too. Or sometimes there'll be a dream sequence but the audience won't necessarily realise it... Or sometimes in animations or graphic novels the imagery will be used symbolically rather than literally -- all create a sense of whimsy.

Magical realism makes very particular use of whimsy in its attack -- any whimsy is normally localised around achieving particular effects with particular characters. It's also less permissive in its use of whimsy in presentation, but I think that this is all a matter of degree.

Magical realism doesn't have a monopoly on its concerns, and other fiction can use the same modes of attack without necessarily sharing the concerns of MR authors. Finally, presentation is often just a matter of style.

In other discussions about fiction categories I've described 'genre' as primarily the place where concern intersects with attack (though genres can also have signature structures and presentations). In terms of craft, I don't think that MR is sufficiently different from other kinds of fiction in its concerns or attack to make it a genre itself -- though people may choose to see it that way for sociological reasons.

[Higgins]

Ah. Ok. Let's re-rail then...

.. Or sometimes in animations or graphic novels the imagery will be used symbolically rather than literally -- all create a sense of whimsy.

Magical realism makes very particular use of whimsy in its attack -- any whimsy is normally localised around achieving particular effects with particular characters. It's also less permissive in its use of whimsy in presentation, but I think that this is all a matter of degree.


Whimsy. I experienced a cataclysm of reluctant recognition when I saw the word "Whimsy"...But I think injections of whimsy are not as harmless as they seem to the non-user. I'm writing a horrifically whimsical mockery of horrible horror and the whimsy seems to twist things more than you would expect. But I guess its a fairly common twist (eg Edward Gorey), so perhaps there's no harm done...at least to the shrubbery that keeps the genres in their different gardens.

[Ruv Draba]

Off-hand I can't think of a horror tale that doesn't have some sort of whimsy at core. Horror uses whimsy to exaggerate and perversify already nasty situations, which I think is what horrifies us.

The whimsy needn't be supernatural -- even the more mundane horrors like Silence of the Lambs or Misery have whimsical elements. Lecter's whole persona is whimsical, as are many of the murders. In Misery the plot is immensely whimsical -- extremely unlikely and just barely plausible.

I've long felt that horror without whimsy ceases to be scary. Take Lecter's uber-shrink personality away, take away the macabre killings and Silence of the Lambs becomes a thriller or mystery instead. Perhaps for this reason I think of horror as a sub-genre of fantasy in a crafting sense if not a marketing sense. Every horror story just looks like a fantasy story to me, with special conventions around mood and plot.

[Higgins]

Off-hand I can't think of a horror tale that doesn't have some sort of whimsy at core. Horror uses whimsy to exaggerate and perversify already nasty situations, which I think is what horrifies us.

The whimsy needn't be supernatural -- even the more mundane horrors like Silence of the Lambs or Misery have whimsical elements. Lecter's whole persona is whimsical, as are many of the murders. In Misery the plot is immensely whimsical -- extremely unlikely and just barely plausible.

I've long felt that horror without whimsy ceases to be scary. Take Lecter's uber-shrink personality away, take away the macabre killings and Silence of the Lambs becomes a thriller or mystery instead. Perhaps for this reason I think of horror as a sub-genre of fantasy in a crafting sense if not a marketing sense. Every horror story just looks like a fantasy story to me, with special conventions around mood and plot.

I agree. Very reluctantly. I thought I was being so inventive (well, in some ways I am, but we won't know until the book comes out or not whether the balance of invention was right or not)...though I'm actually happy not to have been excessively inventive.

So, yeah, perhaps the proper injection of whimsy is a crucial element of all sorts of genres. When writing horrorific stuff I spend more verbiage on the gore-ific elements and when writing Sci-Fi/fantasy I spend more time on describing machinery. I suppose you could say horror involves carefully deploying dismembered bodies and Sci-Fi/fantasy involves carefully deploying very small deus ex machina contraptions. I suppose there is more of an element of assemblage in Sci-fi/fantasy and more of an element of disassemblage in Horror.

[Higgins]

I agree. Very reluctantly. I thought I was being so inventive (well, in some ways I am, but we won't know until the book comes out or not whether the balance of invention was right or not)...though I'm actually happy not to have been excessively inventive.

So, yeah, perhaps the proper injection of whimsy is a crucial element of all sorts of genres. When writing horrorific stuff I spend more verbiage on the gore-ific elements and when writing Sci-Fi/fantasy I spend more time on describing machinery. I suppose you could say horror involves carefully deploying dismembered bodies and Sci-Fi/fantasy involves carefully deploying very small deus ex machina contraptions. I suppose there is more of an element of assemblage in Sci-fi/fantasy and more of an element of disassemblage in Horror.

Note to self: for some reason this reminds me of Euripides play Helen:

Am I to enter the palace with thee, or are we to sit here at the tomb quietly?

http://classics.mit.edu/Euripides/helen.html

[Ruv Draba]

I suppose you could say horror involves carefully deploying dismembered bodies and Sci-Fi/fantasy involves carefully deploying very small deus ex machina contraptions. I suppose there is more of an element of assemblage in Sci-fi/fantasy and more of an element of disassemblage in Horror.
If I ruled the world all literature would be ordered in Dewey Decimal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_decimal) with a special sub-ordering for degree of whimsy (from academic publications through to biographies then realism, adventure, fantasy and tax returns). Only researchers and floor staff could find anything. Readers would be asking "How come a third of your thriller section is in SF; a third is in crime; and a third's in mythology? And how come half your SF section is in fantasy? And wtf - why're all the biographies scattered over politics, sports and arts? And what's my tax return doing next to Nixon's depositions?" But think how much easier it would be to find books when you couldn't remember author or title. :e2brows:

In SF you need a science or technology frontier and a plot built around that. Sometimes the frontier is about using the gizmo, or being a victim of it; sometimes it's about people or a place. The gizmage could be deliberately whimsical (e.g. Space Opera), or inadvertantly whimsical (like the lack of water-pressure in Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), or just adventurous realism (like some hard SF) lacking much whimsy at all.

At the whimsical end I can't distinguish Space Opera from fantasy -- if there's any difference at all it's only in setting. At the hard end SF butts against techno-thrillers (any difference is only in dramatic structure), travel adventures and tales of extreme sports.

[I'd let you sub-sub-order on assemblage and disassemblage below degrees of dissemblage if you wanted. :D]

[Ruv Draba]

Note to self: for some reason this reminds me of Euripides play HelenI was discussing Euripides with my Italian tailor while having some suit-pants repaired. His observation was: Euripides? Eimendades.

[Higgins]

In SF you need a science or technology frontier and a plot built around that. Sometimes the frontier is about using the gizmo, or being a victim of it; sometimes it's about people or a place. The gizmage could be deliberately whimsical (e.g. Space Opera), or inadvertantly whimsical (like the lack of water-pressure in Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), or just adventurous realism (like some hard SF) lacking much whimsy at all.

At the whimsical end I can't distinguish Space Opera from fantasy -- if there's any difference at all it's only in setting. At the hard end SF butts against techno-thrillers (any difference is only in dramatic structure), travel adventures and tales of extreme sports.



I'm hoping a combination of whimsical horror and Space opera and fantasy all works out. I'm going with it until it gets rejected about 30 times.

[storylady]

I love writing fantasy :)