Why Genre Fiction Is Better Than Mainstream Fiction

That title is my opening salvo, bound to be contested by writers invested in believing that the mainstream literary realistic fiction that they compose is not itself actually a genre. It is a genre: the genre that refuses to label itself as such. Because to do so would mean that it is not inherently superior to the "genre fiction" so derided by critics, and self-anointed Literary Critics & Arbiters Of Taste, who deal only with mainstream literary realistic fiction.

Mainstream literary linear-narrative fiction is a genre. It just happens to be the privileged genre. Privilege is where you don't have to defend your existence, and wherein your tropes and idiosyncrasies are taken as normative rather than highlighted as Other, as exotic. It is the no-genre genre, often written in what has been called the no-style style: that bland form straightforward linear prose that is storytelling stripped down to plot without digression, cinematic description without interesting lighting, and characterization more often based on type than idiosyncrasy (although "the eccentric best friend" is such a cliché that it's become a literary trope on its own). Even when mainstream literally fiction is written in a more poetic style, rather than the no-style style it is identifiable by those other characteristics.

Here's another salvo: The quality of writing and storytelling, overall, is often much better in "genre fiction," story per story, than is the case in literary "realistic" fiction. One may place numerous examples side by side and, barring personal taste regarding what you find exciting to read, just on the quality of writing alone many examples of genre novels are better-written than many in the mainstream. Writing that has substance as well as style. There is contemporary science fiction writing that is far more original in terms of style and narrative experiment than anything on the literary best-seller list.

Ignoring for the moment that "realism" in the novel is itself a construct, itself contested as a construct, itself subject to fashions of style and trends of subject matter: in fact the conventions of the Romantic/Victorian "realistic" novel were exactly what such writers as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and even E.M. Forster rebelled against. That was at the root of the Modernist literary rebellion, after all. When Woolf used interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness in her fiction, it is precisely a reaction against the stifling mannerisms of the staid literary novel. As much as I think Willa Cather did in fact write one or two examples of the Great American Novel (I would nominate some of Stephen King's less supernatural fiction as well); as much as I agree that Jane Austen, Henry James, and Edith Wharton were great stylists who brought to life characters that we all still care about; as much as I agree that Victor Hugo was a great, great writer of fiction which he intended to be realistic in its depiction of natural and psychological life, real dialogue, and characters true in motivation to the psychology of real people: as much as all of that is true, once you've absorbed the literary innovations of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and, yes, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Samuel Beckett, you can't go back. You can't stuff those horses back in their barns.

What most critics of the contemporary literary novel do is pay lip-service to the artistic greatness of those older Moderns, while in practice rolling back every new idea they brought to the writer's table. The literary novel these days owes more to Henry James and Jane Austen, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, than any other writers. Even writers such as Mark Twain are considered to be genre writers, and not taken seriously as Authors; which is proven by the typical reverence paid to Huckleberry Finn as one of the Great American Novels, but looking askance at most of the rest of Twain's explorations, such as Letters from the Earth.

In response to critics who like to dismiss this literary-critical dispute as having been settled long ago, I retort that obviously it's not, else the Critics of the Literary Novel wouldn't feel a need to keep setting up straw men to knock down, on the on the topic genre quality. Those self-anointed Critics who would present themselves as the gatekeepers of literary merit and literary taste are fond of building canons, of lists of Great Books, and debating what works should be included in The Canon, and which should be rejected. Meanwhile the average voracious reader just keeps reading whatever they can get their hands on; as always.

Literature remains an artifice. It is art, but it is also artifice. It is made by artists, but also by artisans. It is a made thing, like a sculpture, a painting, a beautiful building. (Music and dance are a bit different, as artforms, because they also involve time. Duration is part of their performance, and they must be performed.) Literature is neither inherently natural or realistic: "naturalism" is itself artifice.

Some of the rise of no-style no-genre fiction can be blamed, and has been, on the increasing professionalization of literature: the authors and critics who make their living by working in academia, or in hosting and teaching writer's workshops, make up a de facto professional class. Writers exist outside the professional-writer mainstream, of course. And it can be argued that writing styles, genres, and indeed approach, stretch across all other boundaries between writers. But professionalism does have an influence on writing style. Robert Bly lamented as early as the 1970s that writer's workshops (which even he taught; you gotta pay the bills) had generated a stylistic (no-style?) sameness among so many poets, in terms of both approach and content. How many MFA programs in writing are there now? Several hundred, scattered around the nation and world? Lots of people write; more than ever. That's only a bad thing if there are more imitators of the sameness than not.

As to the quality of genre fiction writing, I find writers like Gregory Benford, a physicist who writes "hard science fiction," i.e. SF based on speculative science from astrophysics to biology, to be stylists of a high order. Sometimes it's as though the writing style is part of the experience, which style at its best ought to be, enhancing the reading by getting you deeper into the ideas organically. Not telling you about the ideas, but embodying them. Other hard SF writers who have stylistic chops include Kate Wilhelm, Greg Bear, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. LeGuin, and several others I could name. The point here is that SF is not just about the ideas, it's about exploring the ideas in a literary way, with prose that involves the reader. The language envelops and immerses one rather than just being a tale told. On the fantasy side of the speculative fiction genre, great stylists include Patricia Mckillop, Neil Gaiman, and of course J.R.R. Tolkien, whose works helped establish the modern genre.

I would add Charles Williams, a friend of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, one of The Inklings, whose "spiritual fantasy" novel are amazing works of fantastic fiction. In Descent Into Hell, one of his characters is gradually losing his mind in a kind of spiritual/psychological damnation, and the way Williams describes his inner world is compelling and frightening. His novel All Hallow's Eve is a masterpiece, beginning when the protagonist and hero of the novel has just died, and finds herself in an astral version of her beloved city. Throughout this novel, Williams' prose is amazing, perfectly tuned to the emotional pitch of the characters yet original and strange.

I could go with several examples. Suffice to say, one of the reasons I read speculative fiction is because it is a literature of ideas, yet if those ideas were told in the no-style style, they would be dry and boring indeed. The storytelling matters greatly.

I have few grand conclusions to offer, and I know the salvos I have shot across the bows of mainstream literary criticism will be greeted equally with derision and agreement. I do believe it's more than just a matter of taste and preference, though. I believe that it matters how you tell a story. And I further believe that the manner of the telling should reflect what is being told. That is the whole point of literary style, it seems to me.

Writing: On Not Being Able to Fit Into the Boxes

I have difficulty even seeing, much less respecting and obeying, what some writers and editors feel are hard-and-fast lines between poetry, prose, nonfiction, creative writing, and essay. To me those all blend together. The most interesting books I read tend to be like the Japanese ideal of zuihitsu, "following the brush," the great exemplars of which style are Essays In Idleness and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. The American writers who have given us journal-books that move easily between prose, poetry, poetic prose, prose-poetry, and creative nonfiction essay, are who really stay with me. Andrew Schimmel, Gary Snyder, Paul Blackburn's The Journals, which I have only recently discovered, to my great delight.

I love the form of haibun, which is the form Basho's travel journal books are written, with alternating prose and haiku sections, on some pages just a single poem, on other pages a formal haibun which is a prose description of a moment or subject followed by a haiku on the same moment or subject but from yet a different direction. In not irrelevant ways, the haibun is my ideal form for writing.

I see when literary publishers offer open reading periods, during which anyone can submit a manuscript or collection, that they often create fixed categories for acceptance. You have to submit through the Poetry gate, or the Fiction gate, or the Nonfiction gate. But what if your manuscript moves between all of these? What if there is no real distinction, or boundary between them, in your writings? Where do submit them? I often feel a kind of decision paralysis in the face of such categorical requirements, and end up not submitting anything anywhere. Because inevitably I'll place my manuscript in the wrong box, and be automatically rejected.

The fact is, my best writing is All-of-the-above. The writing of mine that I like best, perhaps I should more truthfully say. The stuff that I write that excites me doesn't live within the boxes of Prose or Poetry, but tend to be Prose-AND-Poetry. I readily grant that there are lots of editors who just don't know what to do with that. I'm sure I've caused more than one headache which led to rejection. (There is also the issue that when you read a certain genre, yo bring presuppositions—one hesitates to say prejudices—to one's reading, and things that don't go along the usual trails get rejected not because they're bad but because they are not comprehended.)

Well, I don't want to make editors' jobs harder, and I'm not trying to be difficult, AND it seems to me that the rigid categories between writing genres are in fact a barrier rather than an aide. They are illusory, and often arbitrary, and even occasionally rather dismissive.

Because the one genre I don't really write in, and have no real "feel" for writing in the genre that doesn't like to be called a genre, namely, mainstream literary linear-narrative prose fiction. I have written in that non-genre-genre, an have even been published in it. It is just that it seems like an artificial construct to me, like nothing real at all. Virginia Woolf was right: life is not lived as a neatly-arranged linear prose narrative, as consciousness is both more diffuse and more Brownian (nay, distractible) than the artificial construct of linear narrative pretends it is. And not just Woolf says this, but Albert Einstein, whose spacetime theories strongly imply that everything is always happening all at once, and time itself is a constructed fiction of consciousness that we make up to be able to cope with time.

It's very likely that I will only rarely ever get published. (And thank you ever so much to those sympathetic editors who have been willing to take risks on my behalf!) I just can't seem to stay in the boxes.

Random Notes on a Writer's Life

Productivity: as usual, I am sporadic. As always those critics who think all composers, writers, and songwriters are (or should be!) daily-disciplined craftsmen who write every day, and who dismiss inspiration and the Muses as beyond the pale, are wrong. I've had that argument too many times for it to be interesting anymore: the "you're not a disciplined writer!" accusation against me, because I'm not a daily-disciplined writer, but one who waits and listens for those inner voices to bring something forward—and yet the critics and writers who would chastise me for being "undisciplined" by their standards still can find nothing wrong with what I write, it's not inferior to their own work, I produce enough work to satisfy demand, and despite grumbling they often accept it for publication. My discipline is to always be ready to write it down, whenever it comes forward to be written down. I find nothing kills freshness like stale rote "discipline." It's true that daily writing practice can help you polish your art, and improve your craft—but if you have nothing to say, so what? It's just hollow words.

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So, as usual, I'm sporadic. Yet, in the past week or so, I've gotten down three poems, two of which are probably more in the song lyric column, all of which will be worked on more, later. I've also had some musical ideas floating around. In the next few months, I need to write another larger choral commissioned work, and I'm putting out tendrils to gather in ideas, inspirations, and texts.

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Last night I rolled into the computer a cassette of a Barbaric Yawps live show, recorded in July 1996 at the Madison Art Fair on the Square. I was listening in particular to my own solos on Chapman Stick for those world-music-inspired progressive/free jazz band pieces that we worlked hard to perfect; the Yawps always played on the fractal edge where form and chaos touch, always intentional but near the edge of flying off in any direction. There was a power and life-force aspect to playing with the Yawps that was one of my favorite things about the band. We opened this Art Fair set with one of my own pieces written for the Yawps, "Nomads," which is written in a post-Ellington complex (world music inspired) scale, with polychords; I can readily admit that "Nomads" was my response to "Caravan," just pushed further and a bit more off-kilter and polytonal. (I wrote a few tunes for the Yawps, but most of the music was created by reeds player Tom Lachmund.)

Last weekend I was at Interlochen, in Michigan, for the biannual Interlochen Stick Workshop, my second time attending. I want to do more Stick workshops. I need to reconnect with the music and musicians, and begin doing regular gigs again. This is way of both improving my own playing skills, and networking; both are beneficial. The social aspect of the Stick seminar was actually as powerful for me as the actual classroom work.

Hearing the Yawps recording from 1996, I hear myself playing chordally-complex jazz solos that I can still hear in my head, but haven't played lately. I can hear my conceptual zone in play there, and I had finger dexterity I lack, now. I know I lost ground when I was really sick, a few years ago, and didn't have the strength to do much playing. Now, I want to turn that around. I'm getting my strength back, slowly, and want to get my playing skills back. I like what I heard during this 19 year old performance: recorded before I was really sick, and before I moved out West, and things got chaotic and my (as yet undiagnosed) illness worsened, and robbed me of life-force. I no longer had the strength to practice regularly, and even though I was gigging when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, it wasn't regular, and it was more on the avant-garde and free-jazz range of music-making, which doesn't require me to deepen my performance technique, in some ways. Being at a seminar that forced me at times to back up and re-learn some basic techniques and ideas was refreshing, stimulating, inspiring, and enlivening. Give me more!

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Downside of being a lifelong science fiction, mystery, and fiction reader: I often spot the plot twists well in advance. It's partly because linear narrative has s logic to it, and it's partly because, as a storyteller oneself you know how stories are constructed. Even more than that, as a student of myth and folklore, and of the archetypes, you look for and find patterns in how stories are constructed. It's no secret that Joseph Campbell, the mythologist and anthropologist, was a student of Carl Jung, the depth psychologist who proposed the idea of archetypes of the collective unconscious; and it's no secret that I am a student of both these teachers.

Still, when I encounter a storyteller who can really surprise me, or whose work is a fresh take on the oldest myths, I treasure being surprised. That itself is one big reason I still read SF.

(And for the record, nobody uses "sci fi" to describe the genre except outsiders and popular media junkies.)

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Meanwhile, I had a real, genuine, short story published this year, in JONATHAN magazine. An actual short story! An actual, for that matter, science fiction short story! It was titled "Shimmer," and is in the May 2015 issue. So I guess I can legitimately call myself a fiction writer now, a storyteller.

And I have had a scattering of short-short stories accepted for next year, as well.

I have also had a number of poems accepted for publication later this year.

I don't submit a lot, and I admit I'm sporadic about writing. Sometimes I do my best work under deadline pressure, and when I am asked to write something. It gives me a kick in the pants to get it done.

And my art installation at Silverwood County Park, The Temple of Deep Time, has been extended for a year. And I am being asked to submit proposals for new installations, for other settings and occasions. So I am being asked, and I am working to meet those deadlines.

This also reflects my increasing ability to actually Do The Work. The return of life-force and strength makes me able to meet these requests and goals. For now, it's very helpful for me to have an external push; at some point, the external push will be less necessary, but always welcome. I am still getting used to the idea that, for most of my adult life, I was not actually lazy and unmotivated, I was sick. I was sick! Sick with an illness that robbed me of strength, of life-force, of motivation, of mental health, and much more. I am too old now to probably ever fully recover; and yet here I am, able to do more now than I could imagine a few short years ago, and with the desire to do it all. I will never have "normal health" for someone my age—but I can do more than I have been able to in a decade. I am aware, today, that when I am not feeling PTSD or crushed down by life, I feel so energized I can barely keep myself in my body. And I am aware of how much I want to get done in whatever remaining years I have left.

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It needs to be said, again, though: I don't make art for purposes of "self-expression," that hoary Romantic myth. Sometimes I do, but mostly when I make art I feel egoless rather than ego-empowered. There are things I have to say, and want to say, but a significant percentage of what I Make just has to be made, and I don't feel like I'm in charge, or "controlling" that, or the master of it. It just happens. Often I don't know what's going on anymore than you do—until afterwards. Craft is great for analysis, and theory is great for figuring out what you just did. It's not a very good prescriptive master, though, but more of a tyrant when applied beforehand rather than afterwards.

Novels Are Not Non-Linear Enough

(This rumination was inspired by an essay by Jim Murdoch on how long it should take to write a novel.)

I love reading novels, although I think the ideal length for a novel is the novella, and most of what we get these days is pretty bloated. I read and re-read certain authors on a regular basis, and many of these are authors of novels. I'm pretty much always reading at least one or two novels at any given time. I read faster than most people, I have discovered, so I can read a lot more than many people do. I read broadly, with no loyalty to any genre of novel-length fiction except that which excites, illuminates, stimulates, and surprises.

I'm drawn to Virginia Woolf's least "narrative" novels, such as "The Waves," but also to "To the Lighthouse," one of the greatest novels ever written about the tension between the artist's temperament and the non-artist's inability to comprehend that temperament. I've read all of James Joyce, and most of Samuel Beckett. I've read all of E.M. Forster multiple times. I watch Doctor Who. I read theoretical physics, for fun, and because I'm interested in it and can understand the concepts if not all of the math. Richard Feynman is not over my head, but that's mostly because he was such a gifted teacher and thinker. I've read many of Michael Moorcock's books, including his literary criticism essays. I've read pretty much all of Nikos Kazantzakis, fiction and non-fiction alike, drawn to it because of his courageous encounters with the unknown mysteries that some call mysticism and others call existentialism. I read Peter Matthiessen's novels as well as his creative nonfiction, since he is a master of both. I read all of Jim Harrison's books, finding a voice therein that I feel kinship to out of similar experience and background, who is also different enough that I am stimulated with new ideas and directions of thought.

I read a lot of novels. Yet I don't read many bestsellers, as I find them very predictable. I don't many thrillers, which is what we call adrenaline-inducing suspense fiction written in the very plain "no-style style" of naturalistic narrative nowadays. And I don't read much "literary fiction," the genre of "naturalistic" fiction set in the present day, usually set in The Big City, that defines itself as being the only genre of narrative fiction that is not in fact a "genre" (as opposed to those categories booksellers use to help you find the books easier on their shelves: mystery; science fiction; self-help; etc.). In most thrillers and many mystery novels I usually figure out Whodunit well before it's revealed to the reader; the only time I don't know in advance of the reveal is when the perpetrator is deliberately concealed behind a screen of distractions, as I find most Agatha Christie type of mystery novels to do. I find John D. McDonald's and Raymond Chandler's mystery novels to be far more compelling, because they are character-driven rather than puzzle-driven, wherein sometimes their plots aren't very linear, their heroes and villains neither one-dimensional nor easily predictable. In most mainstream literary fiction, I am drawn to the outliers (Matthiessen, Kazantzakis, etc.) almost because they are considered outliers, a little bit odd, not quite in the mainstream. I was originally drawn to the Beats for the combined reasons that they were literary outlaws, and because several of them were openly practicing homosexuals. We find our (literary) role models where we can.

I do like to read stylistically experimental fiction (William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Richard Brautigan, etc.), and metafiction (Jorge Luis Borges, etc.), but not because it's obscure and difficult—indeed, if I find it to be obscure mostly for the sake of being obscure, a kind of stylistc mannerism rather than form dictated by content, I throw it away—but because experimental fiction uses language poetically, in ways that shapeshift your mind into different ways of perceiving and experiencing reality. (Which is something that science fiction written from an alien species' viewpoint does too, at its best.) I like to experience thinking from inside the alien mind, even if that alien is a human from a different culture, or from a radically different psychology. I like to be surprised, and to experience new ways of thinking, of being.

So I read a lot of speculative fiction—which is usually called science fiction, or fantasy—because it puts your inside a completely different way of thinking about life better than any other literary genre. Speculative fiction is by definition a literature of ideas. Speculative fiction at its best gets my emotions engaged, because it is still telling a human story, even those told at a distance of centuries in the future, which actually is no more alien a territory than the profoundly human stories given us by Shakespeare centuries in the past. I've heard some critics argue convincingly that some of Shakespeare actually could be called science fiction, for the same reasons that Mary Shellley's "Frankenstein" is considered by many to be the first modern science fiction novel: fabulist tales told of incredible and amazing adventures in places not quite real, either in time or space, in which human beings act out the archetypes of story which such gripping writing that we are captivated and find ourselves mirrored in those distant and strange lives. Speculative fiction engages my intellect and sense of wonder, as well, because it is the literature of ideas. Sometimes it can be literally "wow!" mind-blowing, and you finish a novel that makes you think about things in ways you never had before. It can literally "change your mind," if you're receptive and open to that.

I read a lot of "regional" fiction, stories in specific times and places, stories written by writers strongly associated with particular places on the North American continent that happen to be neither New York City nor Los Angeles, the self-involved centrifugal linear accelerators of anointed Literary Establishment mainstream linear narrative novel writing. I like to read stories in places I know well, places I have lived in, places I love; places like San Francisco (which is always a character in any movie filmed there), Wyoming, New Mexico, Chicago, Ann Arbor, the Great Lakes region including Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin. Fiction set in places where you nod your head in recognition of both name-checked street names and locations, and the habits and customs of the local inhabitants. Of course, by this criterion New York City fiction is very much a regional fiction sub-genre (albeit often a very provincial one), and so is fiction set in Los Angeles. One of the things that draws me to "regional fiction" is, again, that it is marginal, not in the mainstream of the East Coast Literary Establishment. I have lived a significant portion of my life in the "flyover zone" between New York and Los Angeles, and I find that writers living and writing from within the heartlands of the continent often have much more to say to me than do writers of the New England or Southern California literary circles.

I also read a lot of shorter fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. I probably read (and write) more essay and poetry than anything else.

So I read a lot of novels.

But of all literary forms, the one I am least, LEAST interested in writing is a novel.

Some of that is because I'm not patient enough to want to write something that might years to complete. It's not that I don't work at making art, and work hard at it, and give my complete concentration and dedication to everything I write. It's that I like seeing a project completed, and another one begun. As a writer, the creative process is what engages me, more than does the artistic product.

And there is also the issue of my fundamental mindset: I simply don't think in terms of narrative. I am science-trained and can think very logically and sequentially, but perhaps that's the problem: a carefully constructed linear plot doesn't engage me very deeply because it's too easy to skip ahead logically and figure it out in advance. I don't even think in terms of linear time (between theoretical physics, a lot of reading in mysticism, and Doctor Who, my experience of time hasn't been linear in a very long time), so making a story conform to the norms of a linear narrative simply does not work for me. I liked how Richard Brautigan used to break up narrative into small vignettes, not always strung together in linear sequence. I like Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness in books such as "Big Sur" and "The Dharma Bums," which is more like Virginia Woolf than anything on the New York Times bestseller lists. As a writer, I have no natural "feel" for plot, narrative, or even linear time.

I am not really a storyteller. Well, I am, because every teller of stories is a storyteller, but I'm not a "storyteller" in any conventional meaning of the term. Thomas Merton was a storyteller, so was Kazantzakis, but their stories were told in ways that no one invested in linear narrative fiction would ever really like. The kinds of stories I most like to tell, or to hear, loop around and around themselves, explore ideas from multiple directions, and step "outside" the linear narrative to look at it from a different angle. (Samuel R. Delany's "Empire Star" is a science fiction space opera that does this unlike almost any other, expanding the narrative viewpoint from straightforward linear narration to multiply-layered causal time-loops that drive the original story by making it happen after it had happened.) So when I act as a storyteller, I almost always get bad feedback from people who want easy, linear, narrative stories—I suspect because on one level they're comforting and affirming, a hedge against the chaos of life that gives comfort by giving chaos structure and order and narrative.

Yet Virginia Woolf said, and experience has brought me to emphatically agree: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." E.M. Forster in most of his fiction has some sense of unexplainable mystery, a break in the ordinary plot of everyday life, which often cannot be explained but which always has a profound effect on the people involved, from his "The Story of a Panic" culminating in "A Passage to India." Beckett, well, Beckett is actually very funny, people miss that about his writing; but it's gallows humor, hospital humor, the humor of those who have survived the unthinkable void at the center of destroyed lives and need to laugh because it's better than crying. Joyce experimented with stream of consciousness, but in a different direction than Woolf; some say he went too far into the terrain of the unreadable, and some have tried to come up with pat explanations for why he might ventured off the edge as they perceive it.

I am having some short stories published early nest year in a literary journal. But really they're prose-poems, and pretty nonlinear. That's how I think, that's how I write. Not in any normative traditional linear narrative style.

But I'm an artist. I'm heavily trained in science, and I know how to think like a scientist, and think logically and sequentially, but I am an artist.

Art is not engineering.

Engineering can be creative. My favorite uncle was an engineer, an inventor, a builder; I helped him build a deck on his house one summer, which he designed himself, and the deck is still there forty years later. He had a very creative attitude towards all aspects of life, which manifested as a problem-solving approach to many things, and which worked.

I see a problem when artists start to think that what they are doing is problem-solving first and foremost. (I see this a LOT among designers and graphic artists, who are also very creative people but whose work tends to consist of more problem-solving than inspiration.)

One of the reasons I don't read many mainstream literary fiction novels is that I find them depressingly predictable, especially the ones oriented more towards plot than character. I find many substitute style for actually having something worth saying. I've read Don DeLillo, I've read John Updike, Saul Bellow, and many other darlings of the East Coast (meaning New York) Literary Establishment.

So I'll probably never write a novel. It's just not a form that works for me as a writer.

Well, actually, I might. I have it in me to write a science fiction novel, maybe two. I've had the basic idea and plot in my head for years, and someday I might write it. I've started writing it two or three times over the years, only to leave it unfinished due to other things becoming more urgent and important.

Novels are generally not non-linear enough for me. The novelistic fiction that I am most drawn to breaks those "rules" of "naturalistic" narrative rather than affirms them. Like certain theoretical physicists and mystics, I view that entire form of linear progressive narrative to itself be a fiction. Or as Doctor Who once said: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but ACTUALLY from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey . . . stuff." Yeah. Exactly.

Writing: Gathering Stems and Branches

There's a writing project I want to start in on. I spent the first part of the morning going through and marking entries in my handwritten journal going back around six years. Marking things I'd written out, but never turned into anything. Some of those pages can be the partial seed of what I want to write now. Formally, zuihitsu, a compilation of things written following the brush. "Twenty-Four Views of Mt. Fuji by Hokusai." Modular. Fragmentary. Linked by mood, topic, tone. Memory books. Pillow Books.

Went into my library to pull out and re-read, or at least skim, some touchstones for what I want to do. Saikaku. The Great Mirror of Male Love. Kenko. Essays In Idleness. Other more modern examples of the form, which after all is an infinitely malleable form. Basho. Oku no hosomichi.

Writing this project will be partially rewriting bits and pieces scattered here and there, bringing them together, making a larger work out of them. Maybe chapbook sized. I'm a good prose writer, although I don't have much ear for fiction. Creative nonfiction is also storytelling, though. I can invent and write if I allow myself to fiction as storytelling, and not wedded to that boring No-Style Style that dominates so much fiction nowadays, the so-called "plain" style.

In reading a literary biography of Roger Zelazny, which I acquired recently, I realize how much he influenced me as a writer of prose. As the book points out, spending a whole chapter on the topic, Zelazny's prose style was always poetic, laced with poetry, frequently requiring a bit of work to get into, but one it revealed itself, sublime. His short "experimental" novel Creatures of Light and Darkness is astounding. It should be taught alongside Wallace Stevens.

That's the only kind of prose fiction I can see myself actually writing: prose fiction that doesn't read like prose fiction. And his short stories, always poetic and sometimes heartbreakingly powerful. Poetic prose that is often oblique, rarely plain.

After reading through old journals this morning, I wrote some notes for what I want to do. Not an outline, never that, just the rule-set for this particular game. Once you write the melody, you improvise around it. Writing prose, for me, to be interesting at all has to be more like jazz, knowing sort of where I'm going but it's 32 bars ahead so take your time and explore the path meanwhile.

This writing project does fall in the category of being prompted, which I know is how I work best. I do well when someone asks me for a piece. Otherwise, I can be lazy, and never get around to it. I love having a deadline, and a goal, and a completion date. I actually work well under deadline pressure.

I also work well when I'm not trying to do anything. When I'm out on a roadtrip, for example, where on those long drives across the land, I do some of my best thinking, and write in my handwritten journal at night, and sometimes in the morning, about whatever I'm experiencing, or thinking about. That's how the elements of the longer haibun sequences of Basin and Range were written, compiled later at home. I scatter a lot of short bits off the back of the wagon, when I roam, and sometimes they add up later.

I'm still gathering. After weeks of thinking about it, at least there's a goal. Awareness of approaching deadlines is my goad. Meanwhile, just keep gathering these loose stems and branches, to build them, and fire them. Ashes and raku to emerge.