Aug 21, 2015

“Why is what you write so…you know, weird?”

Ah. Thank you, Anonymous Fan, for that insightful question. Here is my (hopefully) insightful answer.

I decided when I was eight years old that I wanted to write comedy. Comedy. I have been combining it with speculative fiction for almost a decade, but you have to remember that my first commitment is to making people laugh (more of my thoughts on that will come in a future post). Therefore, what most writers would think of as hard genre boundaries, I see as just so much tissue paper.

This is most obvious in my second novel, You Can’t Kill the Multiverse*, which starts with a wizard trying to get a spell right that would allow him to take control of our universe. Fantasy, right? The next two segments of the story follow a couple of street cops investigating the chaotic aftermath of his spell. Police procedural? What’s that doing in there? Once they realize that the wizard is from another universe, they call in a member of the Transdimensional Authority, the organization whose job is to monitor unauthorized travel between universes. So, finally, we have science fiction!

But, the porous genre boundaries occur in other ways. There are a lot of cultural references in my writing, many to speculative fiction (ie: in my first novel, a character is described as wearing a bowtie “because he had heard somewhere that bowties were cool”), but other’s not (one of the settings in You Can’t Kill the Multiverse* is a place called Joe’s Garage; there are a couple of stoner characters in my first novel whose names are Tommy and Richard; etc.).

For me, it’s all about what will get a laugh in the context of the moment in the narrative. All other considerations (such as genre boundaries) are secondary.

There’s a second aspect to this question; to consider it, let’s go back to that eight year-old boy. He took it into his head that the best way to become a successful artist was to tell stories that other people weren’t telling in a voice that was uniquely his own. If I were able to go back in time and tell him what I now know about writing, I might have told him that he was completely wrong: the easiest way to become a successful artist was to tell the same stories everybody is familiar with (with small variations) in a bland voice. But then again, I might not. Because books with stories I haven’t read before written in a unique style are the kind I love to read, and they say that writers always write the kinds of books they would like to read but can’t find enough of.

So, I’m sorry if you find my books…you know, weird? However, everything new is weird when you first encounter it. But if you give my writing a chance, I think you’ll find that it’s really…you know, fun.

* But You Can Mess With its Head

PS: Big shoutout to Kris Calvin, the first person to pre-order Both Sides. NOW! who isn’t either a friend or family member. You rock!