What is the difference between genre fiction and fiction? Is "fiction" that Oprah style stuff that deals with angst and relationships and people being content with the lives they have etc. etc.? Mmm, maybe I should stop, just in case you like that stuff.

Short stories, mmm ... vignette type things, where someone who doesn't need a lot of introduction falls into something or observes something that makes an impression. Kid losing a balloon at the fair, and an adult nearby remembers themselves at a fair, losing the balloon and remembering their feelings of lose. Put in some metaphors about how things we love slip away.

Or something. Stories like that make me twitchy, cause I read/write for escape and excitement. Remembering personal pain doesn't make for an evening's entertainment.

You got it exactly on the nose perfectly right, Connie. And I read for the same reason you do. So I'm thinking that if she really has such an issue with genre, that's simply too bad, because I can't write just straight up my-boyfriend-left-me-and-I'm-angry fiction. It's boring for me. So I'm thinking of doing a crazy fairy tale mish mash type of thing. But I'm not sure where to go with it, exactly.

I was talking to a friend who wrote science fiction, and she complained that she could think of no original idea. I said that the last people who had original ideas were the Greeks, and even then they may have been stealing from the Sea Peoples and the cavemen. The basic themes are always the same, it's the trappings and treatments that change. Vampire/human slash is just another facet of two people falling in love/lust despite differences. Xander/Spike could just as easily be Romeo and Juliet--without the icky suicides. I suppose someone thought of stories dealing with the impact of an efficient horse-drawn carriage on society, what with easy transportation and people mingling. Not much different than Star Trek.

Yeah, there's maybe 50 plots, if that many. But I'm indecisive, and I can't pick one.

Thanks, though, just talking about this is helping.

I can maunder on for ages on the persistence of plots through literature. Glad it's helping, though.

Xander/Spike could just as easily be Romeo and Juliet--without the icky suicides.

I'm sorry, I went to a snuff place.

Ali, I'm your girl, if there's anything I can do. rebecca_lizard@worldcrossing.com, anything you got yet, or mmerlizard on AIM.

[edited months later to change email address. if you, reader, were wondering]

... The phone just rang and kicked me offline, Alibelle. This other computer with the second phone line doesn't have AIM. I'll be back on as soon as my mother hangs up-- a few minutes, I think?

Got it, thanks. And thanks again, Connie!

Sure 'nuff. Any time you want to chat plot theory and characters and all that fun stuff, I'm your woman. It was kind of thrill in one of my Freshman classes on literature to realize I understood Aristotle's Poetics and his discussions of plot development and the like.

What I was saying is that most lit people's problem with genre fiction is the perceived standard of the writing, both techniquewise and plotwise. I've read hundreds of (I have read a gorram lot of stories.) stories, and quite a few novels, that outrightly referenced fairy tales & preset myths; things like, say, aliens are a little less easy/traditional to swing but I've seen it done. And context is everything. To someone educated on lit fiction, a well-written story you may have classified as SF might be completely literary for them. CP Alex Shakar's marvelous The Savage Girl.

I'm writing a ghost story right now that I fully consider to be a literary story, not fantasy or any other "genre", and if I walked straight in and presented it to a workshop I'd be taken completely offguard if someone called it as such. The snippet you showed me looks like it could be a marvelous, funny little story. Do not allow any questions of "genre" to give you pause.

... Wish my mother'd get off the phone.