On the day we headed to Denver last weekend for my daughter’s volleyball tournament, the minor cold I’d been fighting for 4 weeks morphed into a major cold. By Wednesday I was thoroughly miserable (and waited too long to visit the friendly, neighborhood drug-prescriber). Yesterday evening, after 72 hours of antibiotics fortifying my immune response, I finally felt 85% of normal again.
Because the daughter has tournaments coming up, the wife quarantined me during my illness. No point spreading germs all over the house, ruining days of others’ lives. That forced isolation gave me an abundance of time to read, which seems to never happen. Since at one point I’d found the Red Rising series, I decided to read it with my excess time (along with Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore and The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer).
My verdict: good stuff, like a tasty candy designed for the literary brain, but its derivative-ness got me thinking:
Has popular fiction always been so commonly structured, or is it something new to my awareness because I’m now writing books?
These books are very much the Hunger Games set first on Mars and then throughout the solar system. I liked the Hunger Games series, so why wouldn’t I like these? However, the repetition of conflict, unexpected outcome, near-magical (and hidden) discovery/preparation/backup plan, and ultimately success started to get old. I found myself skipping whole paragraphs of text to get to the next cliffhanger and resolution. Is that a sign of good writing or bad? Why am I reading like an addict in search of the next fix?
While my expected genre of writing is closer to absurdist fiction, it will still ultimately attempt to be popular fiction. If the Red Rising series is an example of what the masses want to read, how much of the population of potential readers should I expect to lose with every decision to deviate from the standard structures and approaches it capably illustrates?
For example, my first novel (which is in self-imposed purgatory as I get some distance from it) is a typical 3-act structure but there is no traditional villain. That doesn’t mean there’s no conflict, but 80% of it is within the main character’s head or nearly completely out of his field of view. Does that choice reduce my potential audience by a quarter? Half? Also, while the Red Rising series is a fairly traditional hero-conquers-all story with good guys fighting bad guys and winning, my novel is as much about introducing a conceptual framework (and a future villain) in an entertaining story as anything else. Did that reduce my potential audience by another half? When I go through these reductions, will there only be seven people left to read it?
Ultimately, I like stories that deviate from the norm. I don’t typically read books from bestseller lists and will never browse such a list to find a new novel. I found Red Rising when it was a single novel, before the series exploded, otherwise I might have ignored it. And while I will read a series or two each year that are popular or NYT-worthy fare, my favorite books are those that blend the weird with the normal, telling a story of human experience that we can relate to via the absurdity.
And I really want to laugh – there were only two moments in the Red Rising series that made me laugh; I wish there had been many, many more. That’s why I like Christopher Moore and Douglas Adams and Max Barry and David Wong and others so much. Those books stick with me, they stay lodged in my brain while new ‘Hunger Games’-like novels are fun for a quick fix but then fade away. There’s something about the structure of popular fiction that bothers me just like the impact of social media on the daughter’s developing social skills bothers me. It’s not developing the brain in a positive way, it’s satiating it. Is it literature or a drug?
So what does all this mean for the novelist who does not want to write the normal?