What do I want as an author?
- I want to write something academics/intellectuals/nerds would spend time dissecting: my references, easter eggs, and/or finding my rabbit holes.
- I want my prose and style to be imitative in the sense of genre (blending or paying homage to) just like how Cloud Atlas and Community does it. (In the case of Cloud Atlas, playing with medium: epistolary, journals, reports, essays, interviews, transcripts. And in the case of Community, playing with genre: documentary, legal drama, horror, western, sci-fi, video game, etc.)
- I want my stories to be entertaining (dramatic tension, action, heartbreaking, tear jerking, suspenseful and thrilling) without sacrificing the above two criteria.
- I want resonance and stayability and intellectual insights (or social commentary) that latch on
- I want a novel (or novels) that people will still read and analyze and share at least fifty years after I’m dead because there’s still relevance to them, and not because it’s an intellectual curiosity.
Books that I aspire to be:
- Cloud Atlas
- Dune
- Ancillary Justice
- Amber Spyglass
What do they have in common?
- They have a “gimmick” but also clear social commentary/themes:
- Cloud Atlas has the structure and genre/medium imitation (journal, letters, expose, interview, oral)… it plays with language.
- Dune has layers of social commentary (colonization, religion, environmentalism, philosophy, politics, power dynamics), cool technology (laz-guns, body shields, ornithopter, mining, still suits), a tragic story of willingly walking into a trap, factions…
- Amber Spyglass: gimmick: soul as animal manifestations, parents who are sus, but also, we don’t really know them…
- Ancillary Justice. social commentary: slavery and colonization, ships driven by enslaved, imprisoned people
- Prose that is often elegiac, poetic, insightful prose
- Not pure literary (I love me my genre): not about suburban life, not purely about relationships, not about difficult people (narcissists, anxiety, people who lose control, predatory, affairs, marriages falling apart, estranged children/parents, self-absorbed introverts, selfish jerks, assholes who push people away as a defense mechanism, cowards who create drama, weak people who create drama and play victim, delusional inept people with too much power, insecure angry people who lash out at loved ones, self-destructive people with a death wish wallowing in guilt and regret). I want those characters in my fiction and I want to explore their emotional interior but I don’t want their neuroses to be the central theme of the story.
- I still want them to have “jobs”, responsibilities where they have to do stuff, not necessarily because they’re good at it, but because they’d completely fall apart without it, because they still have a code or work ethic even if they resent it, a game that sometimes sucks them in without them realizing how much it’s destroying the other aspect of their lives.
- I’m not sure these characters all complete their arc and find happiness (or even contentment or peace), but it fuels them and they try and strive. The events and circumstances that push them into action attempts to force them to confront the reality of their lies, but they might ultimately never truly change. Maybe there’s a brief moment of epiphany, a short spell where they find a true mirror
- The fiction I write has to be something I’m proud of because it’s inherently me: Someone who likes puzzles, games, rabbit holes, references, playing with genre/med aim/style?
- I don’t want to just “check this off the list”. It has to be good. I want the work to have the potential of becoming culturally significant (it has to have meaning and layers. I want to get recognition points for that (insight, wit, cleverness)). And it’s fine if it doesn’t make money.
What Research do I have to do?
- Daily Life of 1300-1500s?
- Political/Religious factions-six at least
- A new combat system because of magic
- What am I interested in learning?