This morning I decided that what I really want now is to find (or establish) a writers’ group that is focused on genre fiction, specifically SF, but I would also like to include fantasy, horror and mystery as well. And, what, you might ask, brings this impulse on? Weren’t you already involved in a writers’ group? Well, I find that I am frustrated with certain aspects of my current writers’ group. Partly this frustration is with the size of the group (frequently twelve to fifteen people attend), partly with its style (readings limited to ten manuscript pages), but mostly I am frustrated with the lack of experience with and/or interest in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely enjoy most of the works read at the writers’ group (such as young-adult fiction and mainstream literature), which, admittedly, I wouldn’t read under normal circumstances. Some of it I plan on buying and reading if and when it gets published. Nor am I trying to suggest that anyone has to be familiar with or like a particular kind of genre fiction. But when I don’t particularly care for something being read by another group member, I keep my mouth shut rather than trying to come up with a criticism. Sometimes I may not have much to add because I can’t think of anything constructive, but if I like it, I make sure to say so.

Now I will be the first person to admit that I struggle with tense and some aspects of punctuation (primarily commas), and I know that I have problems with long sentences and word echo (and I am getting better at seeing those two things). But what I don’t have problems with is spelling (except for the occasional homonym that the spell-checker quite happily passes over) and capitalization. I’ll come back to this in a later post.

One bit of advice that I read at FictionFactor.com is that, as a writer trying to get noticed by agents and editors, one should focus on one’s strengths. Rather than do a mediocre job with everything, emphasize those parts of your writing where you shine in order to make yourself standout to a potential agent or editor. (While I am on the subject of advice I want to issue the following caveat: as an unagented unpublished writer, like any unagented unpublished writer, you should take my advice with a lump of salt.)

Over the last year or so I have taken the above advice to heart and have been focusing on action scenes and exotic far-future settings (i.e. Chronicles from the Nexus), the two things that I have been told that I do fairly well. Not surprisingly, this dove-tails nicely into where I was trying to go with my writing in the first place. Which is action-adventure SF that harks back to the golden age of space opera, but with a strong dose of modern SF, drawing from the sub-genres cyberpunk and the new space opera.

One problem with trying to critique genre fiction is, if you aren’t reasonably familiar with it, a tendency to get hung up on terms that are used commonly in the genre, or, as is common in SF and fantasy, the introduction of new terms. This can be quite a problem when the story doesn’t stop to do an expository dump and leaves the reader to figure out what is going on from context. Or explains it later. Or just assumes that the reader knows what something is from prior experience in the genre.

Another problem, if you don’t like the genre, is the potential to shift focus from the writing to the syntax. What might pass as a minor irritation in a style of writing that you like, becomes the pea under the mattress when you don’t like it.

For example, yesterday evening there was a big discussion of the syntax that I use to represent “linking”, which is a form of communication similar to telepathy. It seemed to me that the people focusing on the syntax (most of them considering it a distraction) came from the non-SF familiar group, and that the real problem was not the syntax, but the fact that it wasn’t obvious what linking was. Another person noted that I should use italics rather than underscores for a ships name. True, if it wasn’t in manuscript form.

Several people were confused by the action scenes. Fair enough, that happens, and I’ll go back over those scenes and address as many of the points of confusion that I can. But what was irritating were the comments about there being “too much” action (particularly from the members of the group who espouse that every story should start with action — but that is a rant for another time). I could understand this if the vast majority of it was action, but it wasn’t. Which leaves me pondering what the root of the criticism was. I think that it has more to do with a perceived lack of who the “good guys” are. But, honestly, complaining about there being too much action in one of my stories is like complaining that there is too much sex in a porn book.

Enough ranting for now.

So, if you know of a writers’ group that is genre friendly in the Ann Arbor area or are interested in joining one, please get in touch with me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Critiquing, Fantasy, Rant, Science Fiction, Seeking, Writers' Group, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.