Transcend my genre? Heck, I'm just trying to transcend basic literacy.

Discussion in 'Genre Discussions' started by mrieder79, Apr 13, 2016.

  1. Indefatigable Id

    Indefatigable Id Member

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    Are you being for real? Like, do you really think that @ChickenFreak just decided to pop in to talk about Steve Jobs for a quick sec and then I just somehow confused Steve Jobs of apple with Stephen King the writer because they're both named Steve? Did you not understand the point he was trying to illustrate? I mean, do you really not see that he was drawing a parallel? You cannot possibly be serious, and yet I feel that you are.

    *Sorry, that sentence was really bothering me. "Insight about seeing things through" is just a weird way to combine words. I would have another go at that one.

    Which is to say that it is impossible to see things from more than one perspective. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

    You officially are the most brilliant person I have ever met online. 7/5
     
    Last edited: Apr 15, 2016
  2. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    :stop:

    And this train of conversation will stop now. As in now-now. Take it PM or let it go.

    I am restarting the conversation for the sake of the OP.
     
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  3. Indefatigable Id

    Indefatigable Id Member

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    Romance is as story of people in love. Someone got squirrelly and decided to throw in a make-out session with a vampire in a dark castle and it became gothic romance. Someone else decided to write a three-way with a werewolf and a vampire and we get paranormal romance. Then someone realized that kids will buy this stuff, but you got to take out all the graphic depictions of sex and so we get teen paranormal romance.

    A fiction genre is like a promise to include certain elements, themes, tropes. So, for a story to transcend its genre, it would have to include elements typically associated with some other genre, I would think. It would have to fulfill its promise to be a "mystery" or a "horror" story while adding something on top of that. I suppose if you were to imagine the perfect story as containing elements of every genre of fiction, such as an epic, episodic fantasy work, you would see that a story can have horror, comedy, mystery, romance and so on. If this "perfect story" were said to be "above" all other stories, then individual works of genre fiction could be said to be "below" this. If you can imagine this, then to "transcend" a genre would simply mean to move more in the direction of this ideal story, where you are telling a mystery with a satisfying romance and some elements of comedy.

    That's my take on it.
     
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  4. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    I think transcendent is two things when it comes to genre. The first is the obvious of including elements from other genres, without being those genres. And the other is reversing the elements of the genre. Just to restate. And I don't think there's anything wrong with genre. Or any problem with achieving originality. I think even formulaic things have originality, you just have to be more detailed and considerate. What the hell is original anyway? It doesn't have to immediately blow your mind to be original. Despite what people say, I don't think that was ever the case. People complain that originality is harder. But I think they're missing what truly makes something original. Which is not whether you can compare on a skeletal
    premise-based level. But whether the whole thing including the ideas and emotions it evokes. And the little bits of the characters.
     
  5. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    I can more comfortably come up with examples of transcending a genre in the nonfiction world. This may be because in the fiction world I expect most books to go above the basic demands of their genre, and if they don't I just don't think they're any good.

    In nonfiction, on the other hand, I will read a merely adequately informative book, and therefore I have special appreciation for a book that goes beyond adequately informative. There's an even more "transcendent" category--books about topics that I don't care about, but I love the book anyway. I wasn't gardening when I fell in love with Henry Mitchell's garden books, wasn't collecting stamps when I read and re-read Herman Herst's books, and so on.
     
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  6. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    Mary Stewart was a Romance writer who had a bestselling popular career in the 1950s and 60s writing Romances.

    She is known as the first Romance writer to combine Romance with Mystery. All of her Romance stories found her heroine embroiled in a mystery of some kind, usually involving a murder. That was a hugely successful crossover ploy and expanded readership of the genre. Many others followed that vein (I think Mary Roberts Reinhart was one of them) and Mystery Romance quickly became an accepted Romance sub-genre.

    I never heard of any Romance reader who didn't like Mary Stewart. Having a mystery either to solve or survive actually heightened the romantic tension in the stories. Oddly enough, they didn't usually take the expected turn, where the hero rescues the damsel in distress. The heroine was often the one who figured out the mystery. There was always an element of danger, but it didn't always 'catch' the heroine in quite the same way. Sometimes it did, sometimes not. That element varied from story to story, so while the reader could be confident that the hero and heroine would 'get together' at the end, the rest of the story was very non-formulaic.

    Sometimes the hero was a person the heroine knew before the story started. Other times the hero was somebody she met near the beginning of the story, and she got sucked into whatever problem he was experiencing. Sometimes the two were allies in solving the mystery right at the start, but occasionally the hero was a suspect for the crime at first. Her stories were less formulaic than many of the other Romances out there at the time.

    Furthermore, what set Mary Stewart apart from many other Contemporary Romance writers were the atmospheric and accurate settings for her stories. These were always places she had lived or visited frequently. She was fond of Greece, Crete, France and Scotland, to name her most frequently used settings. Her heroines were always visitors or newcomers to these places, so readers could wallow in travelogue as well as a mystery and a romance.

    She also had a style of writing that was both emotional and matter-of-fact. She always stayed within her heroine's POV (usually first-person) and these young women were never silly cookie-cutter girls. She is the only Romance writer I've ever truly enjoyed. I have nearly all of her books, and do re-read them from time to time. So I'm definitely a cross-over reader.

    Ironically, Mary Stewart is now best-known for having stepped outside the Romance genre altogether. Her best work is the historical fantasy trilogy about Merlin, written in first person from the POV of Merlin himself. The books in the trilogy are: The Crystal Cave (Merlin as a young man), The Hollow Hills (Merlin meets Arthur and tutors him until Arthur becomes King) and The Last Enchantment (Merlin as an elderly man, helping Arthur to consolidate his kingdom.) She also wrote a fourth in the series many years later, but the name escapes me just now.
     
    Last edited: Apr 16, 2016
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  7. Sack-a-Doo!

    Sack-a-Doo! Contributor Contributor

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    I hear ya. Someone once said, "If they truly knew me, they wouldn't like me," and that thought plagues me daily. I thank the <fill in symbol of higher beliefs here> every day for the Internet (which, BTW, apparently no longer needs to be capitalized, but the argument I read was misinformed like so many things pertaining to the history of computers, so I'm still doing it) so—through the written word—I can still have people to talk to. It also gives me the time to say things over and over before I hit "Post" so I have a better chance of saying what I mean without being too much of a prick about it. ;)
     
    Last edited: Apr 16, 2016
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