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This rant concerns my wish for a new genre. I'm not really sure what to name it; I'm not entirely sure it is a genre, as opposed to (say) just another tag that we can attach to our stories ("MF rom mult hent oyster 350°F [Insert New Tag Here]"). But I wish we had such a tag, because it would be attached to just about every piece of fiction I've ever written in my life. There once was a video-game development studio called Origin Systems. It was responsible for some very celebrated pieces of software, such as the Wing Commander and Ultima franchises. Their motto? "We Create Worlds." Which they did. And which we, as writers, do. No, seriously. Every single story ever written takes place in its own private bubble universe, where all the pre-established rules go out the window. Gravity? Oxygen? Limbs? Sexual reproduction? Traffic lights? (I have plans in the works for a fantasy epic involving elves, dwarves, winged angels, trolls and these little shapeshifting Jedi. If I weren't beating The Reader over the head with the fact that a human turns up in the first chapter and nobody's ever heard of one before, I wonder how long it would take for people to notice.) And part of what you do as you write is to establish the rules as you go. In anything Frank Downey writes, it's a rule that True Love Will Prevail. In Summer Camp , it's a rule that Everyone Thinks Paul Is Hot. (And trust me, I'm a featured editor on his wiki; I can point you to the exact page where it lists all his lovers and all his orgasms [this list is incomplete].) All of Eon's stories feature inconveniently-named characters with semi-angsty but functional love lives. Sorry, I just watched a Zero-Punctuation review and I'm feeling snarky. But all these things are true; I'm just not being kind about it. There are rules, and the author establishes them as s/he goes along. Now, obviously, having different rules is probably more important in a science-fiction or fantasy setting, where the normal conventions of everyday life may be completely different. The first few pages of the Harry Potter novels establish two critical rules: that there is magic, and that Harry is a marked man and a celebrity of sorts (having become the first person in history to survive a normally-lethal attack spell, not to mention having somehow defeated the story's equivalent of Hitler). But, as suggested in the previous paragraph, even in a "real world" story, rules need to be set down. The Naked In School genre, for instance, takes place in a "real world" differing from ours only in the particulars of The Program (how it got started, what technological or societal advances—if any—make it possible, etc), but even then the rules need to be declared: that there is a Program, and that it is normal (or not) for kids to be involved in it, and that we are some distance into the future (or not), and that there are Partners (or not) or Guardian Angels (or not) or hovercraft and teleconferencing (or not). You are hollowing out a space for your story; you are establishing the physical, chronological, societal, emotional, etc. territory it inhabits. You are creating a tiny little universe. And then of course there's the genre conventions, as personified in the "MICE Quotient." If the story starts with the mysterious death of a character, you're reading a detective novel or a murder mystery (or Summer Camp—but even then, Nick acknowledges that he dropped the mysteries of The Wife and "Aunt D" right off the bat so that people would keep coming back for more. Seeing as some of us have been with him for five years now, I'd say he's done a good job). If the story starts with one character meeting a desirable member of the desired sex and then having some sort of emotional interaction with them (attraction, anger, despair, etc), it's probably a romance novel, and (here's a secret) The Reader will expect those two characters to end up together. If the leading character is suddenly dropped into a new and unexpected setting, then the story should be about their travels through this land and the wonders they see as they pass through it (The Wizard of Oz being a primary example). And if the story starts with a sudden, unexpected event which throws things out of balance, then the story should be about addressing that issue and returning the world to balance. Obviously, a story need not be in just one of these categories; Harry Potter uses all four at once: Milieu (the Wizarding world Harry explores, and the Muggle world beyond it), Idea (the question of why You-Know-Who tried to kill Harry), Character (Harry's personal evolution; Harry's slow-growing romance with Ginny Weasley, who is, by the way, the very first Wizarding girl he ever meets, so we're following the romance-novel convention), and Event (the attempted murder of Harry by Voldemort, throwing Harry's life as well as the Wizarding world out of balance, and forcing people to take action to remove from the world the unnatural blight of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named). That whole discourse, by the way, was simply meant to explain that, whatever genre you're writing in, it too has rules, and you had better follow them, because events of the story, particularly the earlyness with which they are presented, are critical rules-of-thumb which The Reader relies on to figure out what direction you're taking them in. If you start, for instance, as a romance, and then suddenly shift it to a mystery drama halfway through, The Reader is not going to assume you're avant-garde; The Reader will assume you're a shitty writer. And The Reader will be right. (You can disguise the first half of the story as a romance; of course you can do that. But it must still be there, disguised or otherwise, so that The Reader, looking back over what they've read, can see it coming in retrospect. If they can't, you're a shitty writer. End of story.) So. Rules. Yes. Every story is set in a reality all its own, and that reality has its own rules and its own internal, logical consistency. And if it doesn't, The Reader gives up in disgust. You see, The Reader is very protective of his/her time and faith. The Reader is not going to waste time on an author who demonstrates that s/he is incapable of following their own rules. That is sloppiness in the first degree, and we all have much better things to be doing with our time. In general, if the story's reality is near enough to our own, The Reader will assume that it is set in a world identical to our own, with the sole exceptions of whatever differences you point out to them; as such, most authors start by setting their characters in "the real world" and then showing how that world differs from our own. ("It's just like ours, except that there are no oceans." "It's just like ours, except that everyone is a vampire/zombie except for a single survivor played by Will Smith." "It's just like ours, except that supermarkets are run by Islamic kangaroos.") Now, here's where my tag comes in. Here's where I finally come in, after all this explanation. I want a tag / genre / label for stories that take their "different from the real world" premises and then apply them realistically. I think the best example I can give you is the opening scenes of the excellent Pixar movie The Incredibles, in which main character Mr. Incredible saves a man who is jumping to his death from atop a tall building. This takes him into the vault of a bank, which is shortly thereafter blown open by a supervillain during a bank robbery; this supervillain covers his escape by blowing out a section of monorail track, forcing Mr. Incredible to stop the onrushing train with his self and strength. What happens next? Well, the jumper sues Mr. Incredible for emotional and medical damages caused by his dramatic rescue! And so do the passengers on the train! Yes, we all laughed when this happened, because it is, in fact, funny. But we also laughed because it is, in fact, true, and frankly it's better to laugh about it than cry about it, which is the other appropriate response. If you had a superhero, especially one licensed and sponsored by the government as the supers in that movie are (see, there's another example of the rule-establishment I was talking about), then of course someone would target them with a spilled-hot-coffee-on-my-lap frivolous lawsuit. Of course the ambulance chasers would be looking for a way to jump them! Free money!, they thought, and went for it—and, because the American legal system is what it is, they won, and the entire superhero force was obliged to retire, take up new identities and abandon the fight against crime and mishap (thus setting up the actual plot of the movie). Cynical, yes, and funny... But also deadpan realistic. It's this level of deadpan realism that I want a label for. I want a label for when the story's unique rules interact with interact "real-world" rules; even better if they do so in an intelligent and realistic manner. What do we call it? I have no idea. We can't call it "Magic Realism" because that's the name of a farce & surreality genre, stories in which magical or extraordinary events are taken as commonplace and nobody reacts to them at all. If science-fiction & fantasy are about unreal worlds with defined rules, then Magic Realism takes place in The Real World but with no rules whatsoever. "Magic Literalism" might be a better term, but unfortunately the genre's already named. (Harry Potter is, of course, rife with this sort of thing; basically, any time someone can do something miraculous but accept it as commonplace, that's Magic Realism.) The only term I can think of is Applied Realism, and I'm not sure if it really fits. Furthermore, I'm not entirely sure it really matters to have a name for this style... Except that we're moving in that direction every day. The Media are on a reality kick right now, integrating their stories into "the real world" in ways which are both illuminating and scary. The Incredibles, 24... Even Harry Potter started moving in this direction as the story went on (but was hampered by the fact that J. K. Rowling never set down very definitive rules for magic. She wanted true magic, where anything could happen; and obviously that's her choice. The problem is, you can't law the lawless). But there you have it. My genre proposal. Applied Realism. And my definition for it: "A story in which the author attempts to integrate that tale's unique rules into the rules of normal, everyday life; a story which attempts to abide by the rules of 'the real world' in addition to the extra ones created by and for the story." Why bother? What does this gain you? Part Two will give you some ideas. |