The Secret Lair

In this episode:

• Chris Miller, “What Day is It?” (from 2006)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04 — 996.7KB)

You know that moment when you walk in on people talking and hear something like, “… and that’s when he looked up and saw a giant monkey Abraham Lincoln,” and you think that there’s no possible logical path that could explain how the conversation got there? What about when you join a conversation halfway through, and raise a point only to be told that Isaac over there already said that an hour ago? What about when you praise something really clever that a friend said, only to have people point out later that he was just repeating something he got from someone else?

That’s why (and how) you should read the classics of your chosen genre if you’re a writer.

Wait, I lost you? Okay, let me back up a bit. Over at the excellent¹ I Should Be Writing blog, Mur Lafferty recently admitted that she has trouble reading some of the classic works of science fiction:

“You know the stuff that was groundbreaking with its expanse of ideas that hadn’t even been considered yet? But it was also the stuff that was very likely sexist, had cardboard characters, was completely lacking women or POC, used what we consider now to be hack tools (eg “looking in a mirror to describe the protag”), and may have protags that are total jerks.”

…

My problem is: how can I appreciate the classics when I run into such painful roadblocks like this? It’s hard to read things I’m not enjoying, even for academic purposes.

I’m fairly certain that everyone who’s ever taken a high school or college literature course can empathize with that last part. But even setting that aside, Mur raises some very valid points. Reading some of these works can be annoying, difficult, or downright frustrating, what with their whitewashed sexism, alcohol abuse, and rampant cliches. And that’s not even getting into the SF-specific problems of talking head syndrome, “As-You-Know-Bob”ing, and use of scientific and other theories that are laughably outdated. So why bother? What’s worth taking out of these, except that people used to think this passed for good?

When I was in college, I had an English professor who was fond of saying that literature is a conversation stretched out over centuries. One person writes a novel, or an essay, or a poem. Someone else reads it and thinks, “This guy is dumb! I’m going to write my own version that’s better.” Or else he or she thinks, “You know, that’s an interesting idea, but what if I go this way with it instead?” Or maybe, ”Hey, that’s great! I wonder if I can do something similar…” So that person writes his or her own creative work in response. Then a third person jumps in and says, “Well yes, but what about…” And on and on we go.

Homer famously wrote the epic poem The Illiad, the tale of Achilles and his embodiment of the ancient Hellenic ideas of individual heroism. Centuries later, Vergil wrote his own Trojan War tale The Aeneid, with its hero Aeneas reacting against the personal glory of Achilles and embodying the Roman virtues of loyalty to gods, state, and family. Ovid was deeply envious of Vergil, so he decided to write his own epic. He recast and rewove the myths and stories handed down to him into one epic tale of change, The Metamorphoses. More centuries passed,  and Shakespeare took the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid’s work, reset it in his own time, and expanded it into Romeo and Juliet. Still further centuries later, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and and Stephen Sondheim decided to update Romeo and Juliet for their time, added music, and we got West Side Story. And that’s just one path in this long conversation, with tons of other offshoots!

SF is full of similar conversations. Isaac Asimov famously coined his Three Laws of Robotics, then proceeded to write lots of stories exploring them. Rudy Rucker read those stories and though that it was completely ludicrous that any self-aware entity would allow itself to be limited like that, so he wrote Software and its sequels to counter Asimov’s ideas. Works like Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime and Gibson’s Neuromancer even launched entire sub-genres.

Well that’s great, of course, but how does that help you enjoy the classics if you just plain don’t like them? Well, a couple ways, I think. Maybe you start from something you do like and trace the conversation backwards. Pick an author or a novel that you really enjoy, and see if you can find who influenced them. Maybe they were writing in reaction to a specific other work. Maybe you really like that author’s style, and you look at the styles that he or she admired. And then you go back a step, and another, and another… You might not enjoy every step along the way, but you might find some things that surprise you.²

It’s also in the mindset. Maybe you can’t enjoy that classic (whatever that means), influential work on its own. That’s fine! No one’s saying you have to.³ But instead of trying to make yourself like something you never will, see if you can try to figure out why other people do like it so much. Why did it influence so many other people? What made it so popular (or infamous) when it came out?

Think of it as a sort of literary forensics. You dig through the distractions to find the little nugget of goodness⁴ that made the work so influential. Maybe you find it and say, “Well, okay, that’s great, but I think Later Author X did that bit better.” Or just maybe you think, “Hmm, so that’s why people like this. I wonder if I can do that myself, but without all the stuff that bothers me.”

Because the great conversation of literature is still going. Find a part of it you like (or really don’t like!) and join in. Heck, you might even end up making monkey Abraham Lincoln make sense.

1. If I truly took the time to give that blog and podcast the praise it deserves, I would probably be making an end-run at finishing a NaNoWriMo word count. [↩]
2. As a personal example, I never would have discovered Lord Dunsany if I weren’t looking for people who influenced H. P. Lovecraft and J. R. R. Tolkien, but now Dunsany is one of my favorite fantasists. [↩]
3. Well, okay, there are probably a lot of angry people on the Internet saying you do, but are you going to let them run your life? ARE YOU?? [↩]
4. “Nugget of Goodness” is the name of my John Scalzi cover band. [↩]

In this episode:

• Chris Miller, “This One Is Perfect (Montage)” (from 2006)
• Seth Harwood, “What’s Next” (from 2007)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:19 — 9.5MB)

In this episode:

• Chris Miller, “Two Days Left” (from 2006)
• P.G. Holyfield, “Talk It Out” (from 2007)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:37 — 6.1MB)

In this episode:

• Chris Miller, “What Would Magneto Do?” (from 2006)
• Chris Miller, “Writing Rituals” (from 2007)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:17 — 3.0MB)

In this episode:

• Sam Chupp, “NaNoBreaks” (from 2007)
• Erik John Bertel, “Are You A Writer?” (from 2007)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:36 — 9.7MB)

In this episode:

• Mur Lafferty, “Kill Your Contractions” (from 2006)
• Nuri Steinhauer, “When You Can’t Write in, Go Out To A Write-In” (from 2007)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:10 — 7.5MB)

In this episode:

• Chris Miller, “Exquisite Description” (from 2006)
• Chris Miller, “Use Sex To Get What You Want” (from 2007)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:11 — 4.8MB)

In this episode:

• Kris Johnson, “Interview Your Characters” (from 2006)
• Seth Harwood, “December and Everything After” (from 2007)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:31 — 6.9MB)

In this episode:

• Mur Lafferty, “Give Yourself Rewards” (from 2006)
• Sam Chupp, “Take Care of the Body” (from 2007)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:42 — 8.9MB)