Great Fiction: Inspired By or Reaction To (Or Both)?

There's no denying it. A lot of (I'd go so far as to say most) great fiction is either: 

[a] inspired by the idea of renewing or continuing something (like Gaiman does with his sort of fairy tale grown-up fantasies that read like children's fantasies or the pulp revivals)

[b] a reaction against something (like the Harlem Rennaissance and feminist literature of the sixties or the Beat Poets)

[c] a little of both (the remix notion of taking something old and making it new to the point the old fans most likely won't like it)

It's a bit heavier of a topic for one of our roundtables, but I'm curious where your body of work falls. 

Aside from esoteric ideas and nature, etc. what are the genres that appeal to you that you want to pick up on their tropes and see them continue through your own work? Which of those tropes and trappings mean the most to you and show up most often in your work?

Kay Iscah: The Seventh Night world is very much about folklore and fairytale tropes. I genre-hop a lot, so won't go into all my books and stories. And it would be another book of literary analysis to answer all these questions. So sticking with Seventh Night and one short story I've written called "The Magically Thinning Mirror" and hitting some main points.

Sean Taylor: Hands down, I love the tropes of sci-fi, horror, and superhero stories most of all. I love the way they so effortlessly settle into a sort of magical realism as people accept all the oddness that goes on around them and just move on with their lives. A guy shoots lightning from his eyes to fix a falling bridge? No problem. It's a Tuesday. A girl who holds her head at her side and talks with you about family secrets? Who cares? She seems nice enough. A friend who can slide between dimensions by tugging the strings of String Theory? Been there, done that. 

HC Playa: Sticking with what I both like and write, that would be fantasy with romance. Now, I have it on good authority that I do not, in fact, write romance (per multiple romance publishers). I write fantasy/adventures that just so happen to have some kissy-face stuff in them 😂. I like the world-building of fantasy, being transported to an entirely different world, be it high fantasy or urban. I also enjoy the human aspect of romance paired with the guarantee of a happy ending. Now, there's a place in fiction for sad and tragic endings. I, personally do not wish to write that most of the time. The world is harsh enough. I prefer to offer an escape. So I like going with larger-than-life protagonists, super capable, highly intelligent heroes. After all, Sherlock Holmes, Superman, and Bilbo Baggins are memorable BECAUSE they are extraordinary. I like the white knight or occasionally they are the tarnished knight...but ultimately good and love always wins.

Looking at those genres you love, what are the things about them that you try to push aside or ignore as a way to bring your own mark on them, or to make them important or apropos for modern audiences?

HC Playa: My heroes might think they are rolling in to save the heroine, but buckle up buckaroos, in my worlds, it's usually the heroines that do the real saving. There are no helpless, hapless damsels. Again, there's a place for that. Plenty of women love the damsel in distress being saved by a savvy, hot hero. One of the reasons I don't fit the romance genre is b/c my plots don't center on the absurd miscommunications and dating games that are central to a romance. If my heroine wants to know if the hero is interested she just asks...maybe it takes working up the nerve, or clever events that drop her hints (or him), but no silly games....after all, they are usually trying to save the world.

A lot of classic fantasy is from a male POV. A lot of romance features overbearing males who just need the right female to "tame" them. I got very tired of both of those things. It shouldn't be THAT groundbreaking for both the male and female protagonists to be badass in their own way and realize they make a great team when they communicate.

Now in newer works, I am expanding to queer relationships. That's a whole other box to unpack.

Kay Iscah: Despite the settings or fantastic magical elements people are people. So if their responses to the unreal feel realistic or natural the character tends to resonate with someone, if not everyone. Cultures and technologies change, but we still tell many of the same fairytales because they resonate with us on very fundamental levels. Escaping abuse, enduring hardships, traveling (or at least leaving home), finding or losing love, pursuing our passions, and longing for wealth (or at least financial stability) are all pretty universal.

Sean Taylor: What I hope most to move beyond in my preferred genres is the (what I call) sort of shallow storytelling that was painted in broad strokes and stereotypes, whether character or plot. I want to create worlds that smack of realism -- at least until the baby elephant grows wings and sings 12-bar blues standards. I want my stories to more accurately reflect the types of people I see on a daily basis. You can call that woke if you want to, but I call it reflecting the real. 

If I'm writing in a specific time period, like my 30s private eye, Rick Ruby, then I want to go deeper than the surface mysteries and tell the kind of stories that couldn't be told back then, whether because of race, gender, or sexual orientation of the characters or the kinds of goings-on in the plots. I want to take the tease of burlesque and racial tensions that made the back cover of the book to sell it but never really showed up inside and put it inside the stories where it belongs. 

What tropes or trappings does your work most try to change? Are there social issues you want to write about (without, you know, blatantly writing about) or stereotypes you intentionally set out to destroy (or for a lesser loaded word) dismantle in your work?

Sean Taylor: I kind of answered this one above, but I really want to write the kind of stories that people I know in my life now didn't have a chance to be written into back in the day. I want to see the pages fill up with non-white, non-straight people, not because I have a political agenda but because they didn't get the opportunity then, and if I can do something about that now... well, it may be too little, too late... but it's something I can do. So I plan to do it. Period.

HC Playa: By having my heroine do the saving, I turn that expectation on its head. I try to make my male characters in touch with their feelings...now occasionally they require a clue-by-four, which often comes by way of a helpful friend/relative/etc. pointing out their idiocy, but I try not to fall into toxic masculinity tropes. Even as a woman, it can be easy to paint what we are used to seeing and not realize we are perpetuating negative stereotypes. With regards to non-heteronormative characters, I (1) don't kill them off, try to show an array of diversity across my worlds, and show love as love.

How have you combined these ideas in single pieces of work before so that you are building and unbuilding at the same time in the same story?

Kay Iscah: "The Magically Thinning Mirror" is a short story written like a fairytale, but it's also a pretty blunt metaphor for anorexia, about a woman who wishes herself thinner until she vanishes altogether. However part of the point of fairytales and folklore is to deliver an idea or lesson without a lecture. You keep the story simple, leaving space for the reader to process their own thoughts on the topic. And by simplifying the story it can have secondary lessons like taking a good thing too far to the point it becomes bad, or not being satisfied with what you achieved.

Seventh Night comes from a bit more of a fractured fairytale tradition. It was inspired by the tone of The Princess Bride, which places fictional medieval-ish settings alongside more modern attitudes, but with heavier fantasy, particularly fairytale, elements. The main book is broken into three "Acts", which is intended to emphasize that the characters are all playing parts that don't necessarily fit who they are. The main book is about taking the characters through the tropes.

But I'm currently working on a set called "Before the Fairytale" which are prequel coming-of-age stories for the main characters in Seventh Night, more parallel stories than a series, so the style of writing shifts a bit in each story. "The Girl With No Name" follows the sorceress. She is a shapeshifter so there are a lot of themes of finding and building identity, but as her story is drenched in magic, the telling is in the style of an extended Grimm's fairytale. There's a gradual shift from less to more detail as the book goes on and she forms a stronger sense of self. But whereas Seventh Night tends built on a stack of tropes, "The Girl With No Name" sets them up and then sidesteps them.

"Horse Feathers" in contrast follows the stableboy whose life is mostly devoid of magic, so the writing style in his story is centered more on realism and descriptions of being stuck in the life of a medieval peasant when you are a nerd at heart. There are unicorns and pegasus (a word that is treated both as singular and plural like sheep), but in the world of Seventh Night, these are not considered magical creatures. "Horse Feathers" has a lot of focus on world-building, but it's the part of the fairytale that tends to get fast-forwarded like "He worked for the lord for seven years." There's a lot of groundwork for how Phillip gets to be the somewhat jaded dreamer or callous callow youth he is in Seventh Night. He actually has a fair bit of adventure, but being a dreamer, he doesn't recognize it as an adventure because it doesn't fit his more romantic notions.

The third book in the set which is written and edited but has had publishing delays is called "The Hidden Prince". While the setting is still a medieval-ish fairytale world, it incorporates a lot of elements of gothic literature including a bit of a murder mystery at the end. Again, this reflects a character who sees himself as a bit of a tragic hero.

The last one in the set will focus on the princess. It's called "Seven and 13", and it's about half-written. The format is a bit more of a series of vignettes, which are not my favorite thing to read but work for this character. I think of it a bit like writing in the style of a stained glass window, so it's about setting visually striking scenes but not much action. In a way, this one's a bit more personal, because it's a young girl navigating the world as a prosocial psychopath, though that terminology is never used, and I doubt many readers would make that connection. But being a thinker more than a feeler and the detachment that comes with that, or simply feeling perpetually out of place in your own life but not having other options.

HC Playa: I have and continue to play in different ways to explore the human experience of love whilst adventuring in pretend worlds.

Sean Taylor: The writers I love to read did this all the time and because of that I tend to do it too. Vonnegut wrote literary sci-fi. Bradbury blended sci-fi, fantasy, and horror almost into a new genre of his own. Gaiman uses the trappings of adult and children's fantasy to tell urban stories about people and their isolation from and longing for each other. 

So, yeah, I do that too. For example in my short story collection Show Me A Hero, which is filled with superhero stories, I have horror stories, adventure stories, romance stories, family drama stories, fantasy stories, and police procedurals. It comes with treating your genre as a setting with rules and bits and bobs, and then realizing you can tell all kinds of stories within that setting. I try not to think of genres as genres at all, but turn them into settings. That is why I can write a romance fantasy set in space during an invasion. That is why I can write a coming-of-age literary tale with a monster stalking the woods. That is why I can write a detective pulp tale that is a literary story with jazz as a metaphor for sexual preference. Writing's just more fun that way.