alexseanchai | (no subject)

Observation inspired by lecture video: It is easier to create a believable story within a dominant culture than a non-dominant one. Especially if the intended audience is the dominant culture. Professor Larison was talking about how "we've all been there" with the details of the picnic scene in the Flagstaff story, but stories like NK Jemisin's "The Effluent Engine", we really, really have not all been there. Jemisin's protagonist's experience of racism is not common to all of Jemisin's audience, in particular the white parts of said audience. Jemisin also has an uphill battle in that she's writing speculative, not realistic, fiction ("The Effluent Engine" is specifically alt-history steampunk). Prof. Larison says to write to convince the most skeptical reader; in the case of a speculative fiction writer, that most skeptical reader is guaranteed to not be a speculative fiction reader. It seems to me that these are similar, though orthogonal, problems.

There is something fundamentally unfair about this.

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Since when is "write to please the people least likely to be your audience" a thing that people succeed in doing? o.O

Shrug, but that's what [it sounded like] the professor said.

...okay, then.

That strikes me as pretty weird.

It made sense in context? Like, you want to be published, you're sending your stories to magazines and whatnot, magazines have slush readers, slush readers have many many stories to read and are looking for reasons to discard yours.

Okay, I can see that one.

This makes me think that being a slush reader is not a very fun job.

The other unfair side of that is that when they say "we've all been there," it turns out to mean that people who haven't been there don't quite count as readers. We're told that fighting on a large-scale battlefield is universal but giving birth isn't, but a lot more people have given birth than taken part in trench warfare. I'm expected to care about the personal lives of certain strangers mostly because they're rich; most of us aren't rich, and even most rich people haven't been on reality television.

So, whose disbelief/skepticism matters here? If you're worried about getting past slush readers, the slush reader for a speculative fiction story is likely to have read a lot of speculative fiction, just as the person deciding whether to publish romance stories or mystery novels probably knows those genres. At some point, it may be worth saying "there are hundreds of millions of readers, I can't possibly interest all of them, who do I want to write for?" and look for ways to find that audience.

Yes true, both points.

There is, and I think it nests somewhere in the idea that to the general readership public, "genre" fiction is supposed to be a guilty pleasure, if it is discussed at all, while "literature" is with reading and discussing, despite being much less satisfying to the reader.

It's kind of the macro discussion of the stated reasons for the Puppy slates with regard to the Hugo awards this year - too much highbrow, not enough entertaining story.

Naturally, it's a lot easier to assert your preferences age more valid when you're part of the dominant culture.

Yup.

Though the Puppies' problem also seems to be that if it's about a Woman or a Gay Person or a Black Person (note that all these categories are mutually exclusive; Audre Lorde never existed) then it Cannot Possibly be entertaining fiction instead of or as well as a political story. (Also note that obviously stories about straight white men are never inherently political.)

Agreed. Same issue in the macro, except instead of it being mostly criticisms about works written about not-straight/not-white/not-men, that criticism is leveled more when it's written by not-straight/not-white/not-men. Because the default means it's about the work, and the not default means it's about the writer.

True point.