If you are a grammar guru you probably take one look at this blog and go, “Argh,” and never come by again.

Calder and I were discussing grammar the other day over a bottle of wine.  (I know, I know.  We both need lives.)  Specifically, we were discussing parallel construction.  One example Calder used was:

“I went to the beach; we had a good time.”

 This should be either:

• “We went to the beach; we had a good time”, or
• “I went to the beach; I had a good time“.

I commented that this blog is riddled with that particular grammatical problem, because I often talk about me, the person, and us, the writing team—all in the same post.  Often I start off talking about me, and use ‘I’ as the pronoun, but then I get on to writing and switch to ‘we’.

Sometimes, when I’m really conscious of it, I’ll take out the ‘me’ and make it ‘us’, but that’s not really fair to Calder. These are my opinions I am talking about, not necessarily hers.  Other times I change the ‘we’ to ‘me’.  Again, that’s not fair to Calder, because ‘we’ write, not just ‘me’.  So in the end I generally leave it as ‘us’ and ‘me’.

I am sure, because of this, the writing in this blog sometimes comes across as quite poorly written.

So be it.

I met someone at a function the other night.  We started talking about books and reading.

“I read a lot,” he said.

I am always interested in readers, and what they read.  “Oh, what type of books do you read?” I asked. 

“I only read literary fiction,” he said.  “I don’t read genre at all.”

It was early in the night, so I just smiled and said something polite and we moved on to films.  (He watched arthouse films.  Are you surprised?)

It depends on my mood as to what I reply when someone tells me they ‘don’t read genre, they only read literary fiction’.  That night I wasn’t up for an argument but pick me at a time when I’m in the mood I will say to you, “If you read literary fiction then you do read genre, because literary fiction is just another genre, really.”

Genre, by its definition, is commercial fiction.  Many of these people who never deign to read genre fiction are actually saying they don’t read commercial fiction.  Yet many of the writers they place on literary pedestals were actually the popular writers of their times.  William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens. 

Jim McCarthy puts it well over at the Dystel and Goderich’s Literary Agency blog in Jim McCarthy on Literary and Commercial fiction.

Wikipedia describes literary fiction thus:

… a term that has come into common usage since around 1970, principally to distinguish ’serious’ fiction (that is, work with claims to literary merit) from the many types of genre fiction and popular fiction. In broad terms, literary fiction focuses more on style, psychological depth, and character, whereas mainstream commercial fiction (the ‘pageturner’) focuses more on narrative and plot.
Wikipedia entry for Literary Fiction.

I didn’t realise that literary fiction was so ‘new’ a genre (or a style of fiction, for those who wish to argue).

Or, as one blog commenter once put it (and sorry, whoever you are, but I didn’t record your name, or where I read it):

In literary fiction the character’s journey is internal.  It’s about the way a character grows or changes.

The very fact that it can be described in seven words says to me it is just another type of genre.

• Literary fiction—focuses on style, psychological depth, and character
• Fantasy—stories set in fanciful, invented worlds or in a legendary, mythic past
• Romance—feature the mutual attraction and love of a man and a woman

and so on.  All these definitons come from Wikipedia, by the way.

Look at the novels in your nearest large bookstore.  You will find a science fiction/fantasy section, you will find a mystery section, you will find a romance section.  You will also generally find a literary section.

I rest my case.

Like most writers, we are too close to our own work to really critique it well.  The writing we do usually sounds trite unless we let it sit for six months.  When we come back then we usually think, “Okay, this writing isn’t as bad as I thought it was,” or, “This is terrible.  How could we write anything so bad?”.

I can’t pick a bad beginning in our own writing, especially not if I have written it.  Calder is a little better, but for both of us it takes ages to write something that isn’t bad.  One thing we both do agree on is that while we can’t tell our own good or bad beginnings, we do know what works when we read it elsewhere.  It’s a pity that what works for one doesn’t always work for the other, but when we both agree on a story that starts well we usually both read the novel and enjoy it.

One on-line forum that I am a (not very active) member of allows writers to post excerpts of their work. 

A sidenote here.  This is one of the first forums I joined.  I was not long out of Critters, and even though I lurked for a couple of weeks, I jumped into the feedback section of this forum way too early.  Posters on this forum did not want serious critiques of their story.  What they wanted was praise.  I gave a fairly detailed critique of a story I read.  It was too detailed.  What I should have done—and what I notice others do—is praise the story if it has promise and not add any comments if it has none.  Occasionally someone adds a couple of high-level suggestions, but that is all.  Moral of the story—it is important to understand what the posters want before you add critiques.  Not only that, you need to know just how serious you are about getting feedback.  If you want real feedback, don’t use a forum like this one.

But back to my tale.

I couldn’t write yesterday.  I procrastinated by flicking through the stories on this forum.  Some of them were typical high fantasies that began with a prologue told in omnipresent point of view, others began with a long exposition to set the scene.  Some wrote in an archaic, “Here there be angels” type of way, others with lots of descriptive three-syllable words.  For most of them I skimmed the first two paragraphs and then move onto the next one, because the openings were rather ordinary.

And then … an opening paragraph that made me sit up and read.  This was good, really good.  Right from the first two words.  It opened with a bang, and kept going the same way.  This story showed real promise and it packed a lot into that first chapter.  Had I been in a bookshop, I would have bought the book right then and there.

It was so good I promptly scanned the rest of the forum for anything else she had written (and I’m fairly sure it was a she, both from her forum name and from the way she wrote).  I found chapter two of the same story.  Bliss.  It was just as good as chapter one.  And chapter three.  These were strong, beautifully drawn characters with a story that pulled me in, and she hinted at so much back story that I lay awake for two hours last night thinking about it.  The back story hadn’t slowed down the main story at all, but the author had hinted at so much, and made me want to know what was going on and what was going to happen.

This girl was good enough to be published.

Sad to say, she stopped at three chapters.

She had two other stories posted.  One went to five chapters, the other to three.  Both of them were good.  The other two were not as good as the first, and all three needed some work but the stories and characters in all three books were compelling. 

I admire any writer who has a voice that strong and good, but I really wanted to shake her.  She had started three great stories and then just stopped.

Now I understand that she may have decided not to go any further with any of the stories.  We ourselves find that if a story is not working we often know around the end of chapter three.  But I don’t think that was the reason this writer stopped writing, and some of the comments on the earlier posts implied that she had done this before (older posts were archived).  I think she’s just not in the habit of going any further.

What a waste.

I went to the movies today—we saw Ratatouille, which I enjoyed, but so many people had oohed and aahed over this movie that I went in with very high expectations. 

At the theatre every second poster seemed to be advertising fantasy movies.  Beowulf, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, The Golden Compass, Stardust.

I think most people would agree that this current rush of fantasy movies began with the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Harry Potter.  I think most of us would also agree that we’re probably at the end of the cycle.  [By fantasy here I’m talking traditional fantasy that started with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and continued with through to the J. K. Rowlings, not the Shreks or the Toy Stories of Pixar.]

I’m enjoying it, going to every fantasy movie I can while the boom is on.  I know that after the feast comes the famine.  But at least there will always be books.  Or I hope there will always be books, anyway.

One thing I do know is that after a run of films like this, a lot of people are going to be inspired to write fantasy novels.

Some of these people may even sell their books, but many of them will not.  Some of these people may ‘discover’ fantasy from these films and go on to read and love it as a genre. Unfortunately, that still leaves a lot of people writing in the genre because it is popular, and they think that therefore it will be easier to sell their book.

That’s the wrong reason to be writing a novel, particularly if you are an unpublished author.

Fashions in films and novels come and go, but in most cases you are going to spend at least one year, maybe more, working on this thing.  It shouldn’t be a chore.  It should be enjoyable.  We all know the stats.  How many writers get published, how little most of them get paid. 

Writing is one of the few things you choose to do.  Okay, some of us might argue that we have to write, we can’t not, and I would be one of those.  But that doesn’t mean that you should just write anything.  If you are happy to write just anything to order, it’s smarter to become a technical writer or something similar—it’s a form of writing, even if it is writing to order, and compared to the income most novelist make, it’s well paid.

I can’t see any point in devoting all that time and all that effort to work on something you don’t truly love, just because you think you have a better chance of getting published. 

Not only that, by the time most people realise that fantasy is a trend—i.e. when the films come out—the trend is waning.