Podthoughts by Colin Marshall: Writing Excuses

Posted by Maximum Fun on 23rd January 2011

Vital stats:
Format: long-form genre fiction writing advice
Episode duration: ~15m
Frequency: five or so per month
Archive available on iTunes: last 35

Being deep in several writing and editing projects, I guess I sit in the prime seats for a podcast like Writing Excuses [RSS] [iTunes]. At first listen, it seems as if almost anyone into writing stands to gain from the show’s topics: getting the first paragraph right [MP3], avoiding melodrama, [MP3], writing what you don’t know [MP3]. These episodes offer deeply practical advice which no novelist in their right mind should ignore.

Notice I said “novelist.” When this podcast claims to be about writing, it means it’s about writing long-form fictional narratives. Something, probably insufficient research, led me to assume the show would focus on generally applicable principles and mechanics of English prose, but its mission turns out to be narrower. Perhaps hosts Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler, two novelists and a comic writer/artist, are simply sticking to their areas of expertise; for them, writing equals writing long-form fictional narratives. I can’t begrudge them that, since, for all the last couple centuries’ hand-wringing over its supposedly imminent demise, the long-form fictional narrative retains an unmatched power to enchant.

But listen longer and Writing Excuses purview shrinks further still. If you know Sanderson, Wells, and Tayler’s names, you probably know their work. If you don’t, no explanation I can offer will put you in its proximity. I’ve looked up their projects, but since my brain processes their titles as an endless procession of meaningless compounds, I’ll just make some up: HawkBane. Murdero. Brokenwind: Bringer of Eternality. Space-O-Crat. Killed By Darkest Death. SpellFelcher. Scratch “long-form fictional narrative” and make it “long-form genre fictional narrative” with heaping, melty scoopfuls of fantasy and science fiction on top.

You either like this stuff or you don’t. I myself tend to find most of what’s offered under the wide banner of “speculative fiction” brutally unappealing, which brings me to the first grand quotation of this review: “A book can either allow us to escape existence or show us how to endure it.” That’s Samuel Johnson, and I don’t think he’d look any too kindly on the heaving mountains of raw escapism fantasy and sci-fi presses pump out with the grim determination of juggernauts. The world-building inherent in these forms strikes me as somehow both pedantic and garish, and, worse, essentially in service of opiate production.

Not that fantasy and sci-fi serve uniquely anesthetic functions (in several senses of the word “anesthetic”); the problem lays in genre itself. Hence this review’s second grand quotation, from Walter Benjamin: “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.” Writing Excuses admits no great works of literature. Willfully or not, the hosts and their guests display little engagement with any fiction outside genre. In the middle of each episode’s writing discussion comes a regular book-of-the-week feature. One recommendation shone amidst all the SkullWinds and Frustrumworlds. The book’s author? Dean Koontz.

In my defense, I’m not one of those cranks who insists all literature ought to proceed from The Unnamable. (But to look at the novelist primers I write for The Millions, I’m getting there.) I appreciate Sanderson, Wells, and Tayler’s obvious enthusiasm for and dedication to their craft. If you do the work of generalizing their recommendations out and away from their convention-bound home turf (in several senses of the word “convention”), you’ll find they know their game and then some. This emerges most clearly when they perform three-way line-edits on concrete examples of prose. Sure, they might well be editing prose about a dragon battling a pegasus, but in that context they’ve got what moves and what drags down cold. Sometimes they even show flashes of recognition that, really, you don’t need to write about a dragon and a pegasus at all. Ironically, that’s when you stop caring so much about all the dragons and pegasi.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]