Just like yours, only bad

[mrissa]

Let us say that you have spoken to a friend about a kind of project that you are interested in undertaking. You are going to write, let us say, a mystery novel set in late 19th century Gdansk among the butchers and the meat-packing trade.*

Let us say that your friend comes upon a mystery novel with that very setting, or perhaps not a mystery novel, perhaps just an historical novel of the butchers of late-19th century Gdansk. Perhaps it's set in Gdynia instead.

Let us say that you investigate this novel and find that it is bad. Possibly it is screamingly bad. Possibly it is just not very good, the sort of mediocre thing one could easily read if one was snowed into an airport and one's electronics were all dead and the bookstore was full of James Patterson. ("It was so sad.")

If you are the friend, when do you find it useful to hear this? How broad a net do you want to cast? Of course one should signal carefully so that, "I saw this crappy thing and thought of your work, which I'm sure is terrible!" is not the take-home message. But when is it useful to know what other stuff is out there either opening the gates or tainting the wells, and when would you just as soon ignore the more obnoxious bits and go forward with whatever you're doing?

*I should not try to come up with random things nobody is doing so nobody thinks I am talking about them, because my brain went, "Ooh, somebody should write me that."

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

If I am reading this right (and I might not be as I am headachy), since the message is not about the writer friend, why should it not be okay to say "I read another novel using that same setting as your piece, but wow, it was a stinkeroo. Definitely there is room for a better treatment of X!" Or am I totally misreading all signals?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess I'm wondering whether you would actively want that. Would you want me to say, "Oh gosh! That thing you said you were working on! There is another thing sort of like it but bad! Do you want to go look?" Or would you prefer that I treat it like any other bad book and pass it by?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I would definitely want to know. Dunno about others!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, this is not a thing where I expect there's a universal response, so hearing what different people think would be good.

Presumably you wouldn't want to hear, "Hey, Sherwood, you write fantasy. Well, I read a fantasy novel! It wasn't very good though. Anyway, hope you're doing well." But on the other hand, if you'd just started Coronets and Steel and somebody said, "Hey, Sherwood, somebody else is doing a Prisoner of Zenda thing! Um. Not what I'd call a successful one. Here's the title," that would be useful to you, from what you're saying.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yes! Exactly. I would appreciate it, in fact.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do you have a sense of where the line between the two is? Because "fantasy novel" is really quite broad, and "drawing on Prisoner of Zenda" is really quite narrow.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I'm having trouble articulating today (definitely a research day) but it's definitely the narrow that would prompt me. To illustrate, well, since you mentioned my own story, I hope I can be forgiven for mentioning it in your space. Coronets and Steel spooled out of me in a month some time ago. Then I set it aside because at that time, there was no mixing of genres.

When I revisited it and liked it enough to try to bat it into shape, I first did as much searching as I could to see if someone else had already done something similar. (This has happened to me before several times, the first one being Sorcery and Cecilia.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I think this is where my reaction is, too. I would want to know.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd want to know, but only if it's phrased that way.

I am often annoyed by people saying stuff like this: "I just saw a review of this New York Times bestseller that sounds exactly like that book you can't sell. How come you can't sell yours?"

Or, even worse, "I just saw a review of this New York Times bestseller about [anything.] That subject obviously sells well! Why don't you write a book about [anything] and make a million dollars?"

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Does it make a difference if the other novel is a good one? In some ways I'd think that would be even harder.


(Some years ago I read a first draft of a relative's novel about gods surviving in the modern world - it had potential but could certainly not be published without lots of polishing. I'm not sure how much of that he ever ended up doing, but it certainly didn't help when a couple years later Neil Gaiman came out with American Gods, treating the same material in a similar way. However, in that case there was no question whether to tell my relative, because whether or not I did it wasn't like he wasn't going to hear about it and almost certainly read it.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, for me, it makes a big difference. "Here is this good thing that may or may not make a giant publicity splash but will be a good thing in the field for those in the know" is something one has to work with/around. I would not advise someone to try to write a really nerdy book about being a teenager on the moon without reading Growing Up Weightless. The risk that it will ruin the person's ambitions completely and they will say, "Well, shit, I might as well go take up golf or at least write a novel about something completely different," is certainly more there than if it was a terrible novel called Jodi Goes To the Moon. But on the other hand, the reward of getting to read Growing Up Weightless is there.

Readers read. We don't, thank God, have the time to read everything. I was just reading about the 14th century, and they were talking about a large library of 78 books, and I thought, no wonder they were always on about enduring suffering as a virtue, bring me one of those plague rats STAT. I mean, just think a few centuries later if you were a peasant Prot girl and lucky to have books at all because it was such a new thing to have them, and the Bible and Foxe's were it, and of course when you got to the bit where Jesus healed the woman who bled for 12 years instead of, I don't know, having her burn at the stake or razing her city or something random like that, you can maybe see where people would go, right, this is the dude, on board with this guy.

But oh how I digress. Anyway, energy, time, and reading speed are one thing. I don't judge based on those. But when somebody says, "Oh, here is this awesome thing in my field? And I have every reason to actually believe it is awesome? But I am not going to read it because I don't want to taint my artistic vision"? That is a person you back away from. Very quickly. Getting large objects between you and them as quickly as possible. Because within the constraints of energy, time, whatever: musicians learn other people's cool songs, and painters look at paintings (and sculpture and cereal boxes), and writers read. And denying yourself the good stuff is not the way to be more awesome.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

But when somebody says, "Oh, here is this awesome thing in my field? And I have every reason to actually believe it is awesome? But I am not going to read it because I don't want to taint my artistic vision"? That is a person you back away from. Very quickly.

I strongly disagree, because prose styles? Contagious as all hell. I cannot read Virginia Woolf if I am writing fiction (which is basically all the time), because everything I write will sound like Virginia Woolf. I have lost good work to contagious recent reading on several occasions.

Rikki Ducornet has written a novel that sounds, from blurbs and people's recs, as though it is probably very good and probably the closest thing in subject matter to my novel-in-progress that I can find. But if I read it while I'm writing the first draft, it will be seriously problematic, because I already know that Ducornet is contagious for me. My current hope is to read it post-first-draft, while the book is resting, but I'm kind of worried about that, even; I need to be absolutely certain to get the novel's voice locked in tight first.

My housemate Thrud has even worse prose contagion than I do-- she actually gets the brain equivalent of earwormed. The only prose fiction she's letting herself read during her present novel is Tristram Shandy, because she would like the book to sound like Tristram Shandy, which, believe me, it does. She does read plenty of comics, though.

So I do think there are legitimate and good reasons not to read something you know will be good on account of what it may do to your own stuff, but then I am also the sort of person who unintentionally speaks in iambs for the rest of the day after reading more than about three sonnets.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

I am so glad to hear that I am not the only person who catches someone else's writing style. There ought to be a vaccine for that sort of thing.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

So not the only one. It's REALLY noticeable when I read Patrick O'Brian, although the first style I noticed myself catching was Douglas Adams.

The only way around the O'Brian thing for me has been to embrace it and write something set in that period.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"I should not read that this very moment" and "I should not read that at all" are two very different things, and I think post-first-draft is a very good place for things. Because taking Virginia Woolf as an example, if you were writing something that was very like Mrs. Dalloway, you absolutely could not expect to just not read it and have readers behave as though you hadn't. They would go ahead and say, "Well, this one twist she did on Mrs. Dalloway was brilliant, but this other one was rather stupid," and you could say, "But I haven't read Mrs. Dalloway," until you were blue in the face and it wouldn't matter. It matters to you in the composition, yes, absolutely. After that, no. You can't scrub it from your readers' brains, so once you'd done your drafting, trying to keep it from yours would strike me as fundamentally ill-advised.

It sounds like writing deliberate Virginia Woolf pastiche is the only solution to one of your problems here, because if you're writing fiction all the time...and reading Virginia Woolf at any time will make you sound like her...and you don't want to give her a complete miss...no, I can't make the math come out any differently there. And I guess I'm glad Thrud has that solution and sorry she has to wait to get earwormed with other things of brilliance later. But if I thought that Thrud would be stuck reading only Tristam Shandy in perpetuity, I have to say I would be less interested in her work than thinking she's stuck reading only it now.

(As for the iambs, iambs are just like that, I expect. That's why English goes that way; or to look at it another direction, that's why we have so many sonnets. I have written complete sonnets in Valley girl dialect--"Like oh mah GAW did you guys see her HAIR?", to start--and redneck dialect just to prove to my own satisfaction that it was English that did that and not one particular form thereof.)

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

You have just got me wondering whether this is the case for Suffolk/Ipswich dialects. I think that there is enough of a tendency towards the trochee* that it may be different. Hmmm. Not really sure how to pursue this, though, without being there. I've got a CD of Charlie Haylock (http://www.charliehaylock.com/) (there's a small extract of him speaking on the website - I don't know how reliable his history or linguistics are but he's definitely got one of the Suffolk accents) reading some of his verse, so that might be good if I can find it, although not exactly an example of casual speech.

*Example: 'Defoe Road' would be a lot more like two trochees from some speakers - Defoe being stressed on the first syllable where it would be stressed on the second in Standard English, and road having two vowel sounds in the middle.

Erm, sorry for thinking aloud at you!

[bradipo.livejournal.com]

I'd have no problem hearing about it.

I certainly wouldn't expect anyone else to have any hope of predicting whether I'd want to read it, because my decisions about the reading of things in any way similar to what I'm writing are deeply idiosyncratic and quite variable.

So, since people can't possibly guess what course of action I might take after hearing about any particular book, I hope they'd let me know, so I can decide what if anything to do with that knowledge.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Rule of thumb: in written science fiction the answer to "Has this idea been used?" is almost always "Yes; twenty to two thousand years before you think it possibly could have been."

If it's not only been done but done well, should you ditch your version? Sure -- that's why nobody's written any dystopias since E. M. Forster's 1909 story "The Machine Stops." Or invasion from space stories since War of the Worlds.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

I too immediately began to wish that the hypothetical novel here was not so hypothetical.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Me three. I am not here to provide any useful input, sadly. I just kind of want to read the meat-packer mystery.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Nope, not just you! (Hi, BTW; I'm "anne" on DW.)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Oh, you're the good kind of ambitious, aren't you? :-) I volunteer to be the proofreader.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Oh is this like me getting stuck on whether a certain regiment was in barracks or tents? I finally said FUCK IT THEY WILL HAVE THEIR IMPORTANT CONVERSATION WHILE WALKING OVER AN OPEN FIELD AND THEY WILL HAVE DINNER AT AN INN.

My issue would be trying to catch the speech rhythms of people who 1) weren't speaking English and 2) whose words, if translated into English, would STILL sound archaic to us.

[howl-at-the-sun.livejournal.com]

I am fairly sure (no one has said quite that thing to me) that I would absolutely not want to hear it, even a little bit. My sense is that reading such a book or even associating such a book with My Book would activate ye olde inner critic well before I actually needed it around. Instead of exploring, I would be going, "Don't be like that guy!"

[clarentine]

I think I would want to know about a narrowly similar book, good or bad, but I almost certainly would not read it while I was in active writing mode on that similar book.

[swords-and-pens.livejournal.com]

This is interesting, since there currently are (and were) books similar to mine popping up on the shelves (or my book is similar to theirs, or...well, it's all about timing at that point, so it works many different ways). None have been quite spot on in terms of precise details, but there is enough overlap that it was something I thought about as this whole fantasy thief thingy was taking/re-taking off and I was still shopping mine about. In one sense, I was pleased, as I knew there was a market for the thing; on the other, there was the concern that my work would somehow been seen as derivative (in a specific sense, not in a genre one). And yes, there was also concern that mine would be outshone and possibly lost in the perceived avalanche.

But at the end of the day? I'm a writer. I am writing my story. Others may have written something similar, but it still isn't what I'm doing. Is it better than mine? Maybe. Worse? Maybe. I don't have any control over that. I can only write what I write. So while I appreciate knowing its out there, I am neither going to fret, nor I am I going to run out and grab it up at the moment I hear about it. I will take it under advisement and into consideration.

So I don't think I'd mind hearing about it. What I would not want to hear are scads of details about its strengths and/or weaknesses. Knowing it is out there is enough, at least in this instance.

(And yes: the butcher/meat-packing mystery sounds wonderful. Anyone feel like pitching it to David Liss? ;)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends on whether the writer is in enthusiastic first vision stage, and whether she's about to spend a lot of time and money researching, and things like that. First, do no harshing of squee....

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I would not want to know if it was that kind of thing. If it was in the same philosophical space and could potentially be useful, that would be different.