A Different Approach
As author and lecturer Zoë Fairbairns says, ‘if your ambition is to write short stories and get them published, read the work of people who have already done both these things’ (2011: 56). This is commonly reiterated advice and Fairbairns is not the only writer to advocate this approach: Annie Proulx suggests that writers can ‘develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading’ (2010: n.p.) and Ian Rankin simply advises writers to ‘[r]ead lots’ (2010: n.p.). As a lecturer in creative writing, I admit to delivering variations on this advice several times in each
semester, usually to undergraduate students. My endorsement of this approach comes because this is my own preferred method of practice and I firmly believe anyone wishing to write successfully in a genre needs to read extensively within that genre.
However, for the purposes of this thesis I will be following an alternative to my personal approach to writing; namely, the suggestion that writers should write and not read. This is an approach advocated by several authors including the
American author Chuck Wendig (2014: n.p.) and the science-fiction author Karen Traviss. Traviss argues vociferously against the advice that writers must read, dismissing the notion as a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument. She says:
The two processes are not inseparable. You can do one, or the other, or both, but you don't need to do one to be able to do the other. It's the same way that a male designer can design clothes for women without wanting to wear them, or a chef can create a dish even if she doesn't like some of the ingredients, and – well, as any professional can create something they don't use or consume. Or the way that a cardiac
surgeon can operate on hearts without actually having a heart condition himself. (Traviss, 2017: n.p.)
35 Whilst I do not ordinarily subscribe to this method, I have adopted this different way of producing the fiction in this thesis because I am deliberately trying to pursue this enquiry through a practice-led approach; that is, researching the relationship between plot and genre by reflecting on my personal practice.
It is acknowledged that, because I have an extensive publication record, and I have spent several years working as a Creative Writing lecturer, I already have substantial prior knowledge of genre conventions. Consequently, whilst I did try to approach the creative task without preconceptions, armed only with a general reader’s understanding of the typical tropes and conventions of genre fiction, it is accepted that, like every writer, I am not able to start from such an uninformed position. Our society is immersed in a culture that is rich in every aspect of
storytelling and, as David Lodge observes when discussing intertextuality, ‘all texts are woven from the tissues of other texts’ (1992: 98-99). Therefore, as a
professional writer, it would be disingenuous for me to suggest that I was starting from a wholly uninformed position. So, contrary to my usual practice, I did begin writing without undertaking a programme of genre-specific reading, in order that my output was not overtly influenced by my having academically researched specific types of text.
This is an approach that follows my interpretation of the method outlined by Dominique Hecq in ‘Theory without Credentials’, where Hecq discusses a self- reflective style of methodology: the methodology of active consciousness (2013: 175-200). Hecq describes this as ‘the process of bringing to consciousness what
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previously lay beneath its surface, namely something pre-conscious or
unconscious’ (2013: 185). To use Hecq’s vocabulary, this allowed me to utilise resources from my pre-conscious or unconscious for the construction of the story. The subsequent self-reflective consideration of the stories has allowed me to consider them by adopting Hecq’s methodology of active consciousness. This aspect of the research is practice-led. As Hazel Smith and Roger Dean explain,
[t]he term practice-led research [is] employed to make two arguments about practice which are often overlapping and interlinked: firstly, as just indicated, that creative work in itself is a form of research and generates detectable research outputs; secondly to suggest that
creative practice – the training and specialised knowledge that creative practitioners have and the processes they engage in when making art – can lead to specialised research insights which can then be generalised and written up as research. (Smith and Dean, 2009: 5)
Given that the experience of writing informs a theoretical response, and that the theoretical response will be used to shape future writing, it could be argued that the research is illustrative of praxis, under writer Robin Nelson’s definition of this concept as consisting of, or comprising, ‘theory imbricated with practice’ (2013: 5). However, even though there is a substantial attention to theory in this research, the practice came first and drove the research. Moreover, the approach described above demonstrates that it is the practice that has been imbricated with the theory, which does suggest that this should properly be described as practice-led
research.
Of course there are other ways in which this research could have been tackled, but none of them would have been able to satisfy my phenomenological need to understand whether or not the notion of plot, as a component part of genre, is an intrinsic part of my own writing. Simply selecting a sample of classic or
37 contemporary short fiction, and then identifying and describing the component parts in a Proppian fashion, would not have indicated whether any of the identified aspects of action, reaction or consequences appeared in my own work.
Admittedly, some aspects of that approach have been cited, as examples of existing fiction are discussed throughout this thesis, but the focus remains on the structure of my original fiction and the extent to which that structure conforms to the patterns that define syntactic genre structures.
One final note about the methodology concerns the length of ‘short fiction’, for there is no prescribed maximum or minimum word length for what constitutes short fiction. Poe (1903: 22), an exponent of the concept of ‘unity of impression’, argued that ‘there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art – the limit of a single sitting’. In many ways this could be likened to Alfred Hitchcock’s
twentieth-century observation that ‘the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder’ (Rose, 1995). Poe went on to point out that:
If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression – for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed. (Poe, 1903: 22)
To that end, to maintain that unity of impression, each piece of short fiction discussed has a length that could feasibly be accommodated in a single sitting. The original fiction here therefore varies in length from the erotic fiction, ‘Victoria’s Hand’ which is only a little over 2,600 words, to the more substantial Science-
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Fiction and Fantasy stories which both exceed 6,700 words in length.16 Although it is understood that most markets specify a word count for submitted fiction, the stories written here have not been created to conform to existing guidelines but have, instead, been written to the length needed to fully deliver an engaging narrative.
What follows now is a discussion of the five supergenres, with each piece of original short fiction being followed immediately by a discussion of the genre archetypes as they relate to classic and contemporary examples of comparable fiction, all of which is presented to support my argument that plot can be perceived as a component part of genre.
16 The full text of the Science-Fiction story ‘Zombie Attack on the Planet of the Scorpion People’ is
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