{"id":271,"date":"2010-06-25T10:00:15","date_gmt":"2010-06-24T22:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=271"},"modified":"2013-02-26T19:23:52","modified_gmt":"2013-02-26T06:23:52","slug":"its-friday-%e2%80%94-but-first-more-on-elizabeth-knox-specfic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2010\/06\/25\/its-friday-%e2%80%94-but-first-more-on-elizabeth-knox-specfic\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Friday \u2014 But First, More from “Elizabeth Knox & SpecFic”"},"content":{"rendered":"

And I will give you the update on writing progress for the week\u2014but at the end<\/em> of the day, guys, not the beginning. (You gotta give a gal some breaks, right?)<\/p>\n

But reading Tim Jones’s<\/strong><\/a> comment on yesterdays’s post on Elizabeth Knox and Spec Fic Christchurch<\/a>,<\/strong> in particular the divide between “literary fiction”\u2014which Knox indicated she felt was ‘just another genre’\u2014and other literature, made me think: do I consciously consider “genre” when I choose a book to read. Do you?<\/p>\n

For me, there are definitely certain kinds of stories that I like more than others (I don’t read much crime fiction for example; not none<\/em>, but definitely not a lot<\/em>): the full gamut of fantasy-scifi (ok, speculative<\/em> fiction) is definitely right up there, but so, too, is historical fiction and historical non<\/span>-fiction. And I do like contemporary realism in all its forms, from the lighter social comedy through to the big serious reads. And when I get to the last page, I usually say one of three things to myself: either, “that was a really good read, I really liked it”; or, “urgh, didn’t think much of that”; or, “it was ok, but it didn’t wow me.”<\/p>\n

I don’t think I ever add the tag: “for a romance”, or “for scifi”, or “for contemporary fiction”.<\/p>\n

There can be all sorts of things tied up in that final decision, such as: did I love the characters? Was I gripped by the story? Did the book contain great ideas? Did I connect with it deeply at an emotional level? Was it fun? (There are definitely always bonus points for laugh-out-loud funny.)<\/p>\n

But probably the most important one for me as a writer is always: did the book absorb me sufficiently that I didn’t even notice the writing, let alone stop to think about how the author was doing what they were doing\u2014what Owen Marshall<\/strong><\/a> calls “taking the back off the clock.”\u00a0 And although it can be great to look at all those tiny cogs and wheels in a second reading, especially when I admire a work, I really like it<\/em> when a book draws me in and wraps me up in itself so that \u2014until that last full stop is reached\u2014I don’t even think about anything except the world of the story.<\/p>\n

Which is why I think (and I think<\/em> from what she said), like Knox, that all this genre stuff is just so much @#!* (full in letters of choice), really!<\/p>\n

But what do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And I will give you the update on writing progress for the week\u2014but at the end of the day, guys, not the beginning. (You gotta give a gal some breaks, right?) But reading Tim Jones’s comment on yesterdays’s post on Elizabeth Knox and Spec Fic Christchurch, in particular the divide between “literary fiction”\u2014which Knox indicated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-other-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}