Go Dark

I didn't hire on to be a factory worker, and that's what genre iditors want.

They want cookie-cutter patterns, the same old setups, setbacks, and resolutions, just like Hollywood movies, and they want everything presented in standard formats.  Vary at all from kittens with wings or dragons or fairies and they can't grasp it, it threatens them, and they bounce it.

This is why genre fiction is stagnant.  It is determinedly mindless.  It refuses to grow.  Innovation is punished.  Disguise it well enough and you might be allowed to play, but that way lies marginalized careers such as Norman Spinrad's, or James Sallis's, or even, yes, Harlan Ellison's.  They might even admit it's good, but they'll punish it just the same.

If one is content cranking out the same old shit time after time, in the same old ways, then genre fiction's for you.  If one is content filling in a paint-by-number format, using the assigned colors, and staying well within the lines, genre fiction's for you.

If you aspire to anything more mature, adult, real, or just relevant, go play elsewhere.  If you can find a place.  And you won't.  The destruction of the mid list by the corporate profit, zero sum mentality has mercilessly rooted out hiding places for genuine self-expression in fiction.  That way lies art and publishers are hostile to art.  They want commerce, pure and simple.  Give them product and shut up about creativity or expressing humanoid primate constants.

You might be able to find a way to address your compulsions and imperatives within the fill-in-the-blank formats genre publishers force upon you.  You might be able to elbow out a corner where you can fake creativity by rearranging things, as the likes of Jeff Vander Meer has done recently by taking a jigsaw approach to accepted topos, tropes, and motifs.

People say, "I want to be a writer," or, better yet, "I want to write," or best of all, "I write."  They never say, "I want to fill in the blanks established long before I was born, and paint slavishly by number so I know I'm safe."  RAH to one side, an exception proving the rule -- and look how self-indulgent he ended up, they also never say, "I want to produce commercial product, like dog food, of a certain consistency, so they can sell it like canned goods, and pay me a pittance for it, using pay scales that haven't changed since the Pulp Era of the 1930s."

That, however, is what "being" a writer amounts to, in the genre markets.

And is there real literary fiction being produced?  Not much, anymore.  Most of what passes for it is simply conforming to the corporate-established Literary Genre.  It's just another label for just another product.  Each year's crop of New, Improved, Advanced, and Amazing litfic is the parallel to each year's "new" car models, which are the same as every other year's models, with some new chrome or plastic or paint on them.

Remember all this if you "want to be a writer".  A writer is, as Jack Warner of Old Hollywood said 80 or so years ago, "... a schmuck with a typewriter".  In other words, a writer is just a volunteer asshole paid slave wages on spec to fill the already-labeled jar with word goo of a certain consistency.

The other arts, such as painting, music, and even acting, are the same.

The real stuff never sees the light of publication, or so rarely does that each exception proves the rule.  And thinking you'll be the exception is the sucker's bet that keeps it all going on.

Go dark.

The dark's where the real stuff thrives, in samizdat privacy, in personal truth.

And the disgust cuts both ways: If I see through the patterns so well, and can do them, why can I not write a few best-selling bits of fluff and have some money & success from which to kvetch?

Self-sabotage is the answer and that's were we step into deeper waters.


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