If you happen to follow my Twitter feed, you’ve undoubtedly notice that I tend to watch a lot of television. And by a lot, I mean not just in volume, but also in variety. I sample a large section of genres, with my primary viewing focused on story.
I am a sucker for story. I can overlook poor acting, even rough writing, if the overall plot and characters are worthwhile entities. Do it right, build both plot and character out in a serial fashion, and television can be just as fulfilling medium as literature and easily trumps film. Do it wrong, and you’re simply couching commercials and wasting everyone’s time. Do it really wrong, and you’re most of Bravo’s reality television programming.
But I really want to talk about one term which only true TV and movie nerds know: Ensign Ricky. It’s a fun little term used to denote a character who is quickly thrust amongst the major players in any story only to setup an emotional shock when said character is killed off. The term references the original “Star Trek” though I first encountered it in Fox’s “Family Guy.”
Tonight, I used the term in reference to AMC’s “Mad Men.” After weeks of half-assed episodes where the characters became their flaws rather simply being guided by them, AMC finally gave us a plot episode. And the Ensign Ricky moment (if you’ve seen the episode, you know what I’m talking about) actually got me to swear out loud and on Skype simultaneously.
Truthfully, the use of Ensign Ricky as a plot device can a bad thing. Over do it, and the audience will become immune. Like any other device, once it becomes a clutch, it becomes cliché. Used sparingly, and in a wholly unexpected way, and the audience is suddenly much more aware. Other characters become more important. A sense of mortality is bestowed. More so, the writers look like they know what the hell they are doing.
So, congratulations go out to the writers’ room at “Mad Men” for pulling themselves out of their funk and finally delivering an episode where the plot shapes the characters and for tossing an Ensign Ricky in to put the cherry on the top.
When I first decided to make a second valiant attempt at writing long form fiction, I was hesitant to address the topic of my brewing works with strangers. All of the half-hearted, and drunken attempts that I’d mustered since the war, the ones that now lay strewn about my office collecting dust in black binders or cardboard bomber bindings, all fit nicely under the broad modern literature umbrella.
The upcoming works, the collection of stories bubbling just below the surface of my fingertips, feel outside that genre, you know, the one we’re supposed to aspire to write to.
I broached the idea, in a casual, sideways manner, to good friend and respected writing cohort, Vito Grippi.
“What are your opinions on genre literature?” I asked, erstwhile, in an instant message.
Perhaps he knew where I was coming from and was simply being socially polite. Perhaps he was being truthful. Either way, his answer provided enough energy to my fledgling and fragile decision in such a way that a large bit of either blame or praise rests on his shoulders.
People think this everyday.
Vito’s stated opinion, that if the work is written well enough, and if the content is smart enough, that the genre means little, mirrored my own. To put it another way, damn the torpedoes and write the fucking book.
Yes, it was Vito’s sentiment, echoing a decision I had likely already made, that pushed me towards writing fantasy literature.
The decision to write a genre book, or in my case – genre books, wasn’t an easy one. I had bought firmly into the pomp and circumstance of modern literature. The desire to write the next Great American Novel was one that ate at me. To sum it all up, everything that is the America of today, the strife, the promise, the technological-fueled desires – they are all still leaping up, waiting for that perfect story to sum them all up. To explain them. To wrap up the meaning of everything so that future generations understand the duende that we now face, these are the questions that a writer today must address, and in turn, must answer. Common knowledge says they must be answered in a modern lit form, a genre that encapsulates the world in which the questions were asked from.
But I was purposefully choosing a different path. And it’s not an easy path to walk. Modern lit is almost defined as doing more with less, a cutthroat use of words so apropos that none other can be used in any given moment. Genre literature, on the other hand, is often ridiculed as doing less with more. It’s contrived. It’s cliché. It’s nerdy and fringe. It’s a sliver of reality at best, and a host of easy outs at worst.
Genre is, of course, none of these.
When we choose to look at the total body of any particular genre, modern literature included, the worth of the body is reduced to the median quality. When genres are considered, that median quality is easily reduced to the clichés – be it dragons and swords for fantasy, buxom women and buffed men for romance, hard boiled and scheming folks for mysteries, lasers and cybernetics for science fiction, or drug addicts and divorced children of modern lit.
The reality, when we choose to flee from such childish clichés, is that genre literature is at the very least, equally enabled when it comes to telling the situations of our modern dramas than modern literature. Genre fiction just chooses to do so in a metaphorical language. Genre fiction takes the obtuse tails of our modern world, and strips away the details which can easily trip a reader up, and supplants those stories into a details setting that is substantially less familiar.
To put it another way, genre fiction takes the core arguments of our existence, and couches those stories in another setting. The tripping points, the niggling details which can easily send a carefully crafted statement into the obscurity of entropy are avoided, in favor of an older form of story telling – that of the parable.
They’re two different tactics, two different roads if one is to borrow from Frost, but the end result is the same. That which we write is ultimately a reflection on the world which we live in. While the current set of stories might be birthed in a fantasy world, the concepts being tackled are no less modern.
I’m using my book, and the stories which are sure to come afterwards, to reflect on the lessons I’ve learned. The times I spent in Iraq, the ideas I have on being a citizen of a nation and a world, the understanding I have gathered from bars – these are all the fodder which will be handled. While these are normally the topics of modern literature, I’m eschewing that instead for fantasy. The problem, the argument, for me is too big to allow for details and their detraction. My use of genre is a means and a method.
I’m sure that I do have that modern lit novel in me somewhere. That story of life and love and trains and God, but right now, I’m not at a point where I can deal with that. Right now, I’m looking not to write the book, but to foster a career. Right now I’m taking the nerdier road, but I am okay with that.
For those of you wishing that I produce that book, I can only say hold on. For the rest, who are open to a story that is truly overflowing with truth, and who are willing to suspend the concept of reality for the betterment of understanding, then I’m working on book for you.
After all, my current work, Project Kingdom, answers more questions than it asks. It deals with being a soldier on the front lines of an empire. It deals with reality versus religion. It asks questions that I would have a hard time framing in a backdrop of reality. And it draws from a history of nerdy concepts.
The short film Validation, available in it’s entirety on the YouTube, came to my attention via that Cable Television Darling (TM), Kevin Pereira. He tossed it up onto Twitter with the statement that it was a great way to start a Saturday morning.
Validation is the type of story I’m not supposed to like. The emotional arc is blunt, as Love Story was meant to make you feel good by making you feel sad, Validation is attempting to make you feel a good by making you feel good. The characters, specifically the protagonist, are almost completely one-sided, seeming to drift more than grow.
All that being said, the story is exceptionally effective. I found myself smiling when the protagonist was at his best, and feeling bad for him when he broke. I wanted the love interest to acquiesce, and at the point in the third act when the story starts to wrap itself up, I knew the ending and was looking forward to it.
All that in a scant 16 minutes of film. Validation is a strong lesson in sticking to the fundamentals of story.
There is an oft repeated phrase amongst those who give advice on writing and maintaining a blog. That bit of advice is to capitalize on the law of large numbers, something which is really only economically feasible online. More specifically, that advice is to limit the topic of a blog as much as possible.
This theory makes a lot of sense. I subscribe to it, and I even pointed this out in a round-about fashion in a post sometime ago regarding lit-nerd-core – a musical sub-genre so specific that it can only appeal to a statistically minute audience. The upside is, of course, that working in such a limited genre will strike a chord with such precision that audience which is eventually attracted will be passionate and loyal.
As turn about is fair play, I can ask this own question of my writings here, about my blog. Am I writing a vanity blog merely here to showcase what I believe to be my talents? Yes, to a point. But more so, am I also keeping to that “oft repeated phrase”, that bit of advice that I abide by the Law of Large Numbers? And if so, how does that jibe with the inherent vanity of operating a blog under one’s own name?
That answer is a bit more complicated. You see, despite the bredth in overt topics in the majority of my blog posts, there is one overbearing theme that is typically represented, that is the attention to story. While I do maintain that my website is a website about writing, and about a writer, the primary core of my content is about story – I just typically strip genre out of that.
After all, television is a fine medium for telling a story, that’s how it started, and even reality television attempts to keep with that trend. I’ll assert that reality television often does a tragically blunt job at doing so, but there is story there. Even in the recurring Monday pieces, the Water Cooler Talking Points, there is the element of story. For what is the “news” but stories of the world.
Despite the relatively wide variety of topics, talking about story is an effort to keep to an older maxim than appealing to the Law of Large Numbers, and that is that no writer can exist in a vacuum. The phrase is typically used to say that a writer must indeed read, but was likely birthed in an era when reading was the primary method, other than oral traditions, in which a writer could observe others telling a story. Today, we are much more blessed. We have numerous genres, and they are able to be interwoven with such ease that “literature” can flourish outside of the pages of books.
I would, of course, be remiss to say that this is the only reason I will blast out a two-thousand word missive on any number of topics. Staying in practice is a wonderful motive, and as I spend the majority of my day writing marketing copy, I often yearn to let my fingers run wild and bang out a piece of what passes as journalism today. This also falls into another old bit of overused writing advice, that of “write what you know.”
As I’ve worked as both a screenwriter and an entertainment journalist, these pieces easily fall into the “what I know” category. As does the current event pieces, a means of adding to experience by observation and empathy. By that logic, however, the invisible connecting thread of story is also something I know, for I’ve been writing those for as long as I can honestly recall.
So, there is a method to my madness, I just choose to keep that method a little out of the way, a little less obvious. In a age where every argument must be summed up in a soundbite, I’m choosing to nuance. Or madness. The two might just be closer than we imagine.
There is an oft repeated phrase amongst those who give advice on writing and maintaining a blog. That bit of advice is to capitalize on the law of large numbers, something which is really only economically feasible online. More specifically, that advice is to limit the topic of a blog as much as possible.
Bradley Robb likes TV and books, and has an intense dislike for cinnamon. Once, Bradley stopped a Soviet T-60 with his middle finger. Bradley writes speculative fiction and edits Fiction Matters, and never really got the hang of talking about himself in the third person.