TECH: Mainstream Genre?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original Posting: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 10:30:15 EDT

We've had our discussions about mainstream, genre, formed and unformed writing, and so forth. I don't really want to restart those protestations of faith, but I found this article interesting and thought I would point you at it. (and yes, you'll find me in the pew of the SF genre most reading times, if that makes a difference)

As a quick summary, I think Dave Wolverton presents a case for understanding where the modern mainstream genre developed from, why other genres offer other strengths, and a final plea that we allow room for many different literatures as good or even great.

some clippings from http://www.sff.net/people/dtruesdale/new/wolverton1.htp

"By insisting that we write elitist fiction with powerful images, opacity, and a distinctive poetic voice; by insisting that the tales lack form; by limiting the types of characters, conflicts and settings; by favoring political correctness over other types of honest questioning or exploration of themes; and by insisting that tales lean toward existentialism rather than some more affirmative world view; a very restrictive genre emerged."

"Unable to explore setting, conflict, characters or themes in their fiction, the mainstreamers wrote more and more eloquently about nothing at all. "

"Sit down and study three years worth of 1980s fiction from the New Yorker, and you will discover a remarkable number of very similar stories. These were the bread and butter of the literary mainstream, and I'll call them 'Manhattan Angst' stories. They dealt with a person--often a literature professor--who goes to a New Year's party in a big city and there meets an old fling, a lost love. The height of comedy is attained when some woman enters the party who is not properly dressed for the occasion. On returning home, the meaninglessness of the protagonist's life is brought home as he watches 'dirty brown maple leaves swirling down to lie amongst the bones of leaves.'"

<slip a bit>

"The existentialists may believe that life is meaningless. Indeed, if you believe that your life is meaningless, it probably will be. But does that mean that art must also be meaningless? "

"As a writer of science fiction, I find it difficult to conceive why anyone would want to obscure the fact that there are cause-and-effect relationships in our lives. Eat too much, and you'll get fat. Breathe vacuum, and you die."

"The existentialists who shout 'Stop making sense!' do so at a terrible price. The fact is that we can make some sense of the world."

"Literature allows us to share experience, to communicate, and to grow not just as individuals, but as societies. Literature allows us to evolve. Literature makes sense."

<and one more snippet>

"Keeping in mind that any of my standards can successfully be violated, here is how I value a story:"

"A story that fascinates is better than one that bores. A story that is eloquent is better than the babboon howlings of the verbally damned. A story that is profound, that transmits valuable insight, is better than one that is pedestrian or that is opaque. A story that speaks to many is better than one that speaks to few. A story that is beautiful in form is better than one that is inelegant, rambling or clumsy. A story that transports me to another world or that transmits experience is better than a story that leaves me sitting alone and troubled in my reading chair. A story that artfully moves me emotionally or intellectually is better than one that leaves me emotionally or intellectually anesthetized."

Something to think about...

FILLER: Cognitive Distortions

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original Posting: Sun, 12 Feb 1995 00:26:34 EST

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
David D. Burns, M.D.
1980 Avon Books
ISBN 0-380-71803-0

If you recognize some of these patterns of thinking in your life, you might want to read this book...

Even if you just recognize some of these patterns of thinking in other people, you might want to read this book--so you can give them some advice...

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3. Mental Filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or another. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

a. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check it out.
b. The Fortune Teller error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already established fact.

6. Magnification (Catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."

7. Emotional Reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

8. Should Statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

9. Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "He's a goddam louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

(p. 42-43)

[OWC: Try writing a story to illustrate each type of distortion, and the results of viewing the world through those eyes...]