What I'm trying to tie in with this conception of SFF is the evolution of a specialized audience, and then the evolution of writing for that specialized audience.
I just took a writing class, for the hell of it, since it was there and I could take it for free. There were no a priori objections to "genre writing" when we began, but two weeks into the class (which was a 5-week intensive), the professor started having issues with my story because there were aspects that he had to work harder than he expected to to follow. I tested a hypothesis by getting a bunch of people who habitually read SFF to read it and tell me what it was about. (I wouldn't just ask them to tell me if it was confusing or not, because they would all say "no" because this was LJ.) They had no trouble with it. I concluded that the problem was not that my professor was stupid, because he wasn't, nor that my story built on ideas that are common in science fiction and only being referenced by short-hand (which I did think might be it until I evaluated carefully) but that it expected to be read in a certain way - with a specific kind of fairly acute attention to world-building and setting - which isn't how my professor read at all.
If SFF is a lens, then I'm trying to find the vocabulary for the kind of reading SFF develops in its readers. Am I making any sense at all, here?
In any case, your post is useful and interesting. Thank you.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2007-07-14 03:16 pm (UTC)What I'm trying to tie in with this conception of SFF is the evolution of a specialized audience, and then the evolution of writing for that specialized audience.
I just took a writing class, for the hell of it, since it was there and I could take it for free. There were no a priori objections to "genre writing" when we began, but two weeks into the class (which was a 5-week intensive), the professor started having issues with my story because there were aspects that he had to work harder than he expected to to follow. I tested a hypothesis by getting a bunch of people who habitually read SFF to read it and tell me what it was about. (I wouldn't just ask them to tell me if it was confusing or not, because they would all say "no" because this was LJ.) They had no trouble with it. I concluded that the problem was not that my professor was stupid, because he wasn't, nor that my story built on ideas that are common in science fiction and only being referenced by short-hand (which I did think might be it until I evaluated carefully) but that it expected to be read in a certain way - with a specific kind of fairly acute attention to world-building and setting - which isn't how my professor read at all.
If SFF is a lens, then I'm trying to find the vocabulary for the kind of reading SFF develops in its readers. Am I making any sense at all, here?
In any case, your post is useful and interesting. Thank you.