In which I combine a couple of my old posts and also add some new thoughts interspersed along the way.
I have been reading Terry Brooks, particularly the Shannara series recently. Say what you will, the man is able to write best seller after best seller after best seller. I’d really like to know how he does it.
There is a tendency among certain segments to dismiss popular fiction, a tendency expressed in the view that if it’s popular it can’t be good.
How do you figure?
Some make the claim that the “secret” to writing for a popular audience is to “dumb down” the story, to write to the “least common denominator”. As one wag put it rather crudely “shit floats.” However, if it were that simple a lot more people would be doing it.
That, of course, can be trivially dismissed. If it were that simple, then anyone could to it and sleep on big piles of money from the sale of same. Excuses abound for why proponents of that theory don’t do it but as we go on and on and so very few do demonstrate that “anyone could do it”, it become eminently clear that the reason they don’t is simply that they can’t. The “theory” doesn’t hold water.
Another claim is that it’s all from the “push” the publishers give certain works. And there is some truth to that. A publisher, and the book distributors, strongly backing a title, selling it aggressively to bookstores (particularly those bookstores that are counted for best-seller lists), getting end-cap displays (those displays at the ends of rows of bookshelves which feature certain works most prominently) and so forth can drive a lot of sales for a particular title . . . for a while. But sooner or later, and usually sooner, people start noticing that a book is annoying or offensive or, worst of all, boring, and stop buying it. Of course, by this time the publishers have found their Next Great Thing and are pushing that.
But popular fiction tends to stay in print. People keep buying it even after the “push” (if it ever had any) is over.
Some people dismiss popular fiction as lacking meaning. I happen to think otherwise. You can’t write popular fiction that sells to large numbers of people, that continues to sell long after any “push” it may have gotten has faded, that continues to sell long after any “derivativeness” that let it ride on “coattails” of something else (Brook’s entree, The Sword of Shannara was actually marketed “for people who’ve read The Lord of the Rings and are looking for something else to read”) has been expended, without touching something in the psyche of the vast body of the human race. Some psychologists might call that something “the collective unconscious.” Whatever you call it, it’s something that you have to touch in order to be popular as I have described here, not just short term sales driven by lots of hype but to convince people, lots of people, to shell out money that could buy a meal, a six pack of beer, a couple of steaks to grill, or whatever else they might spend that money on and to keep convincing people to do that, to recommend their friends do that, to show it to their kids and have their kids do that in their turn.
I’ve used Terry Brooks and The Sword of Shannara here. Another example is Heinlein’s juveniles. I’ve had some people tell me that they “don’t work” anymore as juveniles because society has changed too much. Well, that hasn’t been my experience. Perhaps they weren’t so dated when I first read them back in the mid seventies (or perhaps they were–it was known that Heinlein’s Mars and Venus were no longer possible and Have Space Suit, Will Travel was already Alternate History rather than future fiction). On the other hand, I read them to my daughter in installments as bedtime reading (got a little distracted before getting to Citizen of the Galaxy, which isn’t one of my favorites anyway, and I’m not happy with the new/original ending to Podkany of Mars so I’m reluctant to include it) and she loves them. She even, without prompting, echoed my sentiment that Have Space Suit, Will Travel begs for a sequel. Such a pity that there’s probably no writer alive who could do it justice.
Those books worked because they touch something deep inside people. And even though “society has changed” (It Says Here) and the stories are “dated” yet they still can touch a nine year old girl so that she wants more.
To be popular, and especially to remain popular, fiction must strike something within people’s hearts and minds. It must resonate with many people. It must tap into the heart of what makes us human. Jung might call that the “collective unconsciousness.” (Please, that’s just a label. Don’t take it as an endorsement of any of Jung’s “theories.”) Whatever you call it, it’s something that, without which, fiction cannot be popular.
That something can be base in nature–appeal to sex drive and titillation, for instance–and some areas are certainly easier to get that emotional connection than others. But that very ease only speaks to how very powerful the emotional drive in humanity is. Porn, to use the classic example, is an economic powerhouse precisely because the drive is so powerful. The danger with that one is that it is so powerful that in stories that evoke it everything else gets lost behind the power of the sex impulse. And the stories become only about sex, with the rest being mere window dressing.
But another drive, one nearly as powerful, is that toward what we can call agency. Whether a person has control over their own life, or not. I note that a lot of “literary” fiction is about the lack of agency. They are overwhelmed by events, swept along by circumstances over which they have no control. Popular fiction often takes the other side. People’s fates are to a greater extent their own. While they may face enormous challenges, their actions matter, if only to them. Agency is at the core of both events of the story (plot) and character development.
Let’s take another example, the late Kenneth Bulmer’s “Dray Prescott” series (Bulmer writing as Alan Burt Akers, writing as Dray Prescott–the conceit being that Akers is transcribing tapes recorded by Prescott.) It’s an old style “Sword and Planet” romance, probably the last great sword and planet series. One of the common themes is that the main character, Dray Prescott would be dropped into a situation where he would often be captured and enslaved. But in the course of the story arc he would escape, overthrow the slavemasters, gain power and prestige, and then get dumped into another circumstance where he’d start the whole thing all over again. It’s all about attempts to deny him agency and his fight to not only regain it for himself but to help others win it for themselves. He has three primary motivators: to win back to his love, the incomparable Dellia of Valia, Dellia of the Blue Mountains, Delia of Delphond, to prepare the cluster of continents in which most of the action takes place to defend itself against the reiving Shanks from the other side of the world, and to end the practice of slavery.
Now, some people might claim that that “agency” idea is unrealistic. That people have little control over their own fates that they are swept along by events beyond their control. Perhaps. In some places and some circumstances. But he idea of agency is deeply rooted even in classical literature. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, for instance, the tragic characters build their horror with every choice they make. the events are only tragic because of the choices the characters make. If Hamlet had made choices of the kind Othello would have made, he would have carved Claudius like a suckling pig the very night the ghost told him of his murder. If Othello had made decisions of the kind Hamlet would have made, he would have delayed and waited, and checked and double checked until Desdemona’s innocence was at last revealed. In neither case would the story have been a tragedy, not in the classic sense. They built their prisons, brick by brick.
And so, it would appear, agency is at the heart of much, if not most “popular fiction” (genre or not). It also appears to be at the heart of that “classical literature” that people actually read and enjoy. Shakespeare survives not because professors of literature declare his works as “literature” but for the simple reason that through the centuries people watched and read and were swept away in his work. He was among the popular fiction of his day . . . and to the present time, in fact.
And thus, we see that popular fiction is literature, in the true meaning of the term, in that which touches the heart, the mind, and the soul. Without that touch, nobody would read it. Without that touch, nobody would buy it.
That is what I want to do with my fiction. Now if I can just figure out how Heinlein did it and how Brooks does it today.
The Writer in Black 