The Wearing Out of Genre Materials

Genre fiction, like all fiction, is a compromise.

Narrative fiction – unlike lyrical verse – cannot produce the big scene, or the rush of emotion, or the spectacular situation, or the emotional high point, in a chronological vacuum. Part of the story must be given over to rationalization, to chronological and/or dramatic development, to the background and explanation that make the emotional high point possible, let alone plausible, let alone reasonable, let alone humanly interesting.

That is, fiction is a wish made plausible. (I have developed this formula out of my own experience in writing and personal acquaintance with some two dozen living writers.) The written story is a compromise between the germinal, wished-for situation, action, or scene and the surrounding fictional circumstances which make the original X possible in a connected, chronological narrative. (Without a connected and chronological narrative, you have a lyrical treatment, not a story.) In good writing, the compromise between the wish and the forces of reason or conscience is in itself interesting and moving because it is in itself representative of human life. Our feelings, our actions, our perceptions and our decisions are a series of just such compromises between what we want, what we want to want, what we think we ought to want, and what we know (or believe) we can get. The process I have called making the wish plausible may in fact take over the work and itself become the work; then you have a story of disillusionment or self-deception. Bad writing is often called undisguised fantasy, but I would prefer to call it the wish insufficiently worked on by reason and conscience – good fantasy is often quite bald, and certainly no one could say of Sophocles' Oedipus that it is a “carefully disguised” fantasy. On the contrary, the Oedipal content of Oedipus (!) is hardly disguised at all, except by the character's denial that he knew what he was doing; what has been added to the wish (following Freud's notion of it) is the corollary: What if this really happened? That is, the original fantasy, again following Freud's idea of it, is combined with reason and conscience.