“Doesn’t a sentence, whatever meaning it releases… appear to be telling us something simple, literal, primitive: something true, in relation to which all the rest… is literature?” — Roland Barthes

“I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards, OK? What I was asking in that scene is: what if politicians continue to pay doctors peanuts? Could they literally turn into monkeys? And no one’s asked that before.” — Garth Marenghi

So.

I was talking with an acquaintance the other day about books and writing and stuff and I made the confession that I am not actually one for genre fiction these days, and he says, yeah, but, and he starts telling me apropos of very little that he’s been reading this really excellent series of detective novels — I honestly couldn’t tell you a title or an author. But he says that they’re good writing, and I say OK, what are they about? And he says something like, they’re about this detective and she’s disabled and in a wheelchair, right, and she solves crimes. And I say cool, but what are they about? And he’s like, what?

See, the problem I have with an awful lot of genre fiction is that isn’t actually about an awful lot except its plot and premise (which in science fiction and fantasy is expressed in a central “what if”). And by “about” I mean about something present, current, human, something true. Granted, also, a lot of it is because most genre fiction on the market is written in vast quantities by people who think any idiot can write and consider the license more valuable actually learning to, you know, write, but that’s another essay. Or possibly a rant.

Let’s assume we’re talking about that minority of genre writers who can actually write and who are aiming at doing something a bit more serious, a bit more crafted. OK?

This is part of the reason why many mainstream critics and intelligent readers dismiss sci-fi and fantasy at the end of the day, even the heavyweight stuff. It’s part of the reason why literary writers like Margaret Atwood have often tried to deny that their novels should have the “S” word and the “F” word attached to them . There’s this very real, very powerful and not altogether unfounded fear that a book labelled as science fiction is somehow disqualified from literature.

It’s a really big part of the reason why more people take Jane Austen — for example — so much more seriously than any number of genre novelists. But even Austen’s novels happen in a world as alien to the modern reader as anything by, say, Frank Herbert, underneath all those brittle witticisms and long dresses and Regency dances and house visits and astute social commentary about social mores in the Georgian era, is something fundamentally true. Something about the way we sabotage our affections, find ways to hide behind artificial constructs, and embarrassment and pride (and hell, prejudice too) rather than grasp hold of things that should be far more precious to us. You never went to a Regency party. You never lived in a country house. It doesn’t matter. It’s true. You never lived in a country house. It doesn’t matter. It’s true.

But a lot of genre fiction isn’t about that shared human experience. A lot of genre fiction, even genre fiction considered serious and heavyweight — I’m thinking of several living writers here, but let’s not name names — has no subtext, no human core.

I’m talking about the stuff that’s solely about those what-ifs: what if someone learned how to make self-aware robots? What if aliens made contact using a big black rock that made monkeys hit each other with sticks? What if the powers that be decided that the only solution to the population problem was to mince up dissidents and serve them up to the populace as whole as tasty snack foods? What if everybody went blind and in the resulting chaos got preyed upon by giant ambulatory carnivorous plants with whippy tentacles? What if the gorillas got smart and took over?

Which is all well and good, but none of this has that truth in it. Which is not to say that genre fiction can’t have that truth, and when you compare it to the stuff that doesn’t, it’s blindingly obvious.

Avoiding slamming living authors, I’ll turn to television programmes: Heroes, for instance, just doesn’t. Even when it wasn’t shit, it was always devoid of meaningful subtext. It’s a show with no layers, only concerned with the what-if: what if some people develop superpowers? Without any truth to anchor it, it got very stupid very quickly.

On the other hand, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although with a premise that was daft any way you looked at it, got away with it because it was about a woman’s rite of passage into adulthood. It’s interesting that the further it got from its original setting the weaker the show got, actually. Few rites of passage are as potent as the teenage ones.

Or Battlestar Galactica, which got away with the lameness of its what-ifs and garnered mainstream praise because — and it pains me to admit this, because I couldn’t ever get past how pompous and hokey and humourless it was — it actually was about something, about the things we do to each other in the name of ideologies and prejudices and duty. If it hadn’t had that core of shared meaning, that core of truth, it would have ended up as stupid as Heroes did. And actually, that core of truth was what made Battlestar Galactica end up smarter than a show that was just lame and hokey, like Andromeda. Or the original Battlestar Galactica, for that matter.

I don’t have a whole lot of time for Tolkien, either, but let’s face it, I’d be an idiot if I couldn’t see that he represents the experience of the ordinary person when faced with huge events, and the way in which even the smallest of us have something heroic within ourselves. Tolkien’s brand of story has been pastiched a near-infinite number of times, but not really duplicated.

You have to bear in mind that when I talk about truth in subtext, I’m not talking about a slavish adherence to facts here. Truth and Fact are two different things, and although evangelicals, crusading evolutionary biologists and Republicans have trouble getting their heads around this, a story can be true without having a single grain of fact in it. It’s an important point, because having truth is not the same as preaching, or party politics, or morality plays, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

Good subtext does not preach. It shows. It represents.Good subtext does not preach. It shows. It represents. It is not trying to make a point or frame an argument. It’s trying to show you something that you can identify with. A political point isn’t completely worthless — Harper Lee and Dickens and Steinbeck are all proof of that; so are George Orwell, Antony Burgess and HG Wells. But none of these writers descended to simple sermonising (well, maybe Dickens, a bit, but he was paid by the word, so what can you do?) and none of them are about party politics, or political issues that are only tied to their own time. Every one of them speaks to something current, something that will always be current.

War of the Worlds is a classic example, actually. I mean, yes, it has an alien invasion as its central plot-moving event, but really it’s about the behaviour of people and societies when faced with events bigger and more frightening than they can understand. I read it around September-October 2001, actually, and remember how accurately Wells’ account modelled the headlong descent of the West into the madness of the War on Terror.

Or Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, whose futuristic youth culture seems ridiculously quaint now, but whose narrative shows what it’s like to grow up and lash out and listen to the darkest urges humans have. Perhaps it’s partly to do with Burgess actually retelling the story of the rape and maiming of his own wife from the perspective of the rapist. He never condones or excuses his narrator, Alex. It’s apparent that Alex is a monster. But he understands him. Burgess says, I could have done it. You could have, too. It’s a tremendously humane book. And it’s true.

Now story — and God help us, even plot sometimes — are important too. In fact, story is vital. Plot (which is like a mechanical apparatus on which story is presented) less so. So many writers of genre fiction and media get it totally the wrong way round (you only have to look at a couple of recent big budget Hollywood films made around toy licenses to see what crap you get with story-free plot).

I mean, Plot is nothing to be scared of, and if you’re going to dispense with it, you’d better have a reason for doing so. So David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which is like in my lifetime top five (and is so science-fiction), actually couldn’t have worked if it had been tightly plotted. That it’s sprawling and digressive and largely plot-free is largely the point.

I suppose I should talk about what I’ve written. I’m not going to pretend I’m of a level with all the writers I’ve mentioned, but I was aiming high.

I wrote “An Angel” some years ago. I was trying to put in words what it feels like to lose someone. It’s really about the toxic grief and guilt that descends when someone you love is suddenly gone. I wanted it, I suppose, to be a story about an angel, too, but that’s really secondary, and I think it shows. I’m not a hundred percent happy with it. I revisited it after posting it here and maybe I’ll post the better (and by “better” I mean “shorter”) version I came up with.

I think I’ll probably leave working on it for a bit.

Memory Sticks is the longest sustained piece of fiction I’ve finished. Parts of it have been knocking about for over ten years; the Grimslade digression in part two, for example, and the character of Alis herself (originally “Alis” was a company system misspelling of “Alice” that she had become conditioned to accept, but I didn’t like that, and wanted to tie the character in with another fiction I was writing, which may get an airing here some time). The novella as you see it here was largely written between 2005 and 2007, bar a bit of tweaking and the ending (everything after the section titled “The best she’s going to get”) which I wrote only a few weeks before posting it on Jet Pack. The ending is the only one that makes sense to me.

There’s a lot of experiences that went together to make poor Sarah’s crisis and resolution (and incidentally, a single personal crisis is traditionally the touchstone of the novella as a distinct form), some of which come from my brief stint as a phone-monkey in a call centre, and one or two of which are directly inspired by a close friend who got the most appalling treatment from the newspaper at which she worked.

I suppose that what I was trying to write about, more than anything else, was the experience of seeing your thirtieth birthday recede into the distance and suddenly thinking one day, what the fuck am I doing? Where am I? Who is this I am sleeping with? How did I end up here… from there?

I mean, OK, I wanted it to work as a story in its own right even if you don’t get what it’s about, but the SF elements are just metaphors for regret and loneliness and, well, I don’t know anything about things like mind control or tiny robots rebuilding brains and it was interesting that in the comments following the one review of the print version — on a dedicated SF site — I was largely rumbled in terms of my sci-fi. As in, I don’t really care about the science or the science fiction, so much as just the fiction. I cannot bear to write a story without at least trying to get a bit of subtext in there.

It’s what interests me more.

I mean, if what I wrote turns out to be SF, I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But I’m not aiming to write science fiction. I’m just aiming to write something true. Genre’s a trap.

Truth, on the other hand, is everything.

Thus, I may never finish my first novel.

It’s tricky, because your debut novel has to be something bold and wave-making, but it’s also bound to suck a little bit if it’s actually your first, because what the hell kind of experience do you have writing a novel, right? (But novels don’t work like that, do they?) Your debut should be brilliant, shining like sterling, so the world sits up and takes note. Then you should top it with your sophomore effort, which should benefit from all the lessons you learned on your first. That buys you the luxury of slipping into something smaller and more indulgent your third time out, at which point your bibliography is varied enough that anything is possible, in any genre. You’ve become a writer of literature.

As a would-be full-time novelist, this is what career planning looks like. I sit on my couch in the middle of the night, pretending I’m awake instead of asleep, drinking vodka from a glass skull, and I plan (excuse me, I “plan”) my choice of first novel to maximize the effect of my debut. I consider which novel is better to write first, for the sake of impressing potential agents and publishers. Two things define novelists, after all: the oeuvre and the debut.I believe it, because I’ve told it to myself a whole damn lot.

(I love that word, debut. I would love to debut sometime. I’ve got a couple or four dozen books in the world and yet I’ve never debuted anything. They just got released. Sometimes they streeted. But not one of them ever debuted.)

Out of procrastination — which is a kind of fear — I convince myself that I am somehow being productive when I break yet another story for a novel without having even finished a first one yet. I have a half-dozen novels in various stages of outlining and research, any of which could be my first. I’m strategizing, see? It’s a business plan! I’m putting my would-be novels in order, considering whether it’s best for my career to be the guy who wrote this fantasy thing or that sci-fi thing or that speculative thing first, and which should come next to best add breadth and surprise to my bibliography. The part of my career where I get around to actually finishing a novel? That will come later. I believe it, because I’ve told it to myself a whole damn lot.

How do you decide which of six novels should be your first? They all have stories that want to be told. They all have things that make them topical and things that suggest they’ve missed their window. They all suck, right now, and they all might be great if you fulfill the potential they said you had in school — if your first novel is a breathtaking debut from a bold new talent.

Which is it? Is it the authentic character-driven tale of your own turmoil and pain, disguised in an urban fantasy that’ll pigeonhole you forever? What about the was-topical-four-years-ago speculative thriller with possible value for its movie rights? Don’t forget the adventure yarn you cooked up as a potential movie idea but were convinced to write as a novel because the market’s better for those. Is there a whole novel in that comic-book outline you did? Maybe you should start with your sci-fi heist story or a sword-and-sorcery yarn.Whichever you do first has to be spectacular, because you’ve theoretically been working on it for thirty years. (You haven’t.)

Whichever you do first has to be spectacular, because you’ve theoretically been working on it for thirty years. (You haven’t.) But whichever it is, it better not be your best work, or else you’ll be a hack or a laughingstock before long. You can aim at whatever the market is buying right now, or you can be so good that fads don’t matter. You can trust that some agent will see your potential beyond the single manuscript, or you can be realistic and accept that it won’t be good or sold or beloved, but will at least exist.

Trouble is, the novel that doesn’t exist is perfect. It is everything at once. It is printed on fine imaginary paper in the matte black ink of infinite possibility. Why diminish it by writing it?

Simply put, fuck all that. The novel that exists trumps those that don’t. These are all excuses for not writing. You can muck around, prioritizing novels that don’t exist, but that’s a kind of lying to yourself.

Write it. Everything else comes after.

Now let’s see if I can put my novel where my mouth is.

In case you somehow haven’t been told to listen to it yet, here’s Merlin Mann on getting creative work done, from MaximumFun.org:

The Sound of Young America