Release the Kraken! - I Am A Fantasy Writer.
When I wrote my first novel, The Labyrinth, it honestly never occurred to me that I wasn't a realist, a mainstream, salt-of-the-earth, if slightly cracked earth, writer.
If you've read The Labyrinth, you might find this slightly difficult to believe. It involves talking animals, doors that eat people, a sentient maze, and queer angels. But for someone like me, steeped in classics to the point of leaking golden apples and bull-sex machines out of my very pores, all of this seems quite normal to me, the stuff of Literature. Of course, contemporary ideas tend more towards the Theban (the urban angst of sleeping with just the wrong person) as opposed to the Olympian (the celestial angst of having slept with just the right person in the form of a cow or a shower of gold coins, and then she gave birth to a Minotaur and/or a banker and you know, both are very inconvenient houseguests.)
But what did I care for Thebes, when there were nymphs and satyrs in that nice wood over yonder?
And then a publisher picked it up. And my editor started saying things like "dark fantasy." This turned my head completely around. Sure, I was a little surreal, funky, even, but I felt "fantasy" was taking it a bit too far. My husband very gently poured me a cup of tea, sat me down and told me that, strictly speaking, animals don't talk, mazes are cute little things made out of cardboard they put up for Halloween carnivals, and angels are supposed to be androgynous and sexless, so they can't really be queer. Oh, and there's no such thing as angels, anyway.
You are not a realist, he said. Realism doesn't have alligators preaching the gospel.
Then realism is stupid, I said, and it was a crocodile.
Nevertheless, I was uncomfortable with the idea of myself as a fantasy writer. I had a whole host of ways of getting around calling myself one:
"I'm interested in things that transcend genre, no matter what that genre is."
"I just work here. I write the books, and other people tell me what genre they are."
"I'm an interstitial writer."
See, because even though I am a reader of fantasy and science fiction, I had been so indoctrinated into the literary/academic system which says all fantasy has embarrassing cover art and involves elfsex, and can never be as good as the most unassuming realist novel involving real things that real people do, (despite their being fake people doing fake things and no more real than Frodo himself) that even while writing, as I currently am, a novel which features rather heavily a Japanese dragon, I couldn't bear to have that label applied to my complex, atavistic, folklore-based snake-beast. Fantasy, after all, is for people who couldn't get over reading Tolkien in eighth grade. Let a professor tell you often enough that you'd better start writing about your childhood trauma and quit this fairy tale bullshit and eventually, you'll do it, and you'll believe that you're doing the right thing, the adult thing. The label has been so derided, even by people safely under its umbrella, that young authors like me already know not to touch it with a ten-foot dragonlance before we're even out of the gate.
Under the genre tent, new circuses go up every day, new ways for us not to call ourselves the F word, even allowing SF as a term to engulf us completely for a variety of strange reasons having to so with "hard" techno-lit being somehow more legitimate than "soft" magic-lit. The invisible Other F is a marginalized one. We embrace all these new words in order to avoid the big one - slipstream, interstitial, mundane SF, infernokrusher, magic realism. Of these the most offensive by far is magic realism. If it has magic, baby doll, it ain't realism. But in the gentrification of books, the realists can take the most visible sign of fantasy and call it their own, and more, call it "edgy" and "fresh" when it is theirs, and "clichè" when it is ours. I know few writers who are not to some extent guilty of this three-coconut game of genre identification, and I certainly do not exclude myself.
But I was at the World Fantasy Convention last weekend. It's awfully hard to avoid the label in a place like that. And at the awards banquet, these amazing people whose books I have always loved got up and talked about what it was to create these things out of whole cloth, to walk in dreams all your life, and bring them out of yourself so that others could share them. They talked about this community of dreamers, who dream for everyone who doesn't quite know how. And I could not think of a more honorable profession, a more beautiful and sacred avocation than dreaming for the world, than being the source of new folklore, of new myth, and the continuation of all the old myths, and all their showers of gold. I was, for the moment, moved and proud beyond words.
And I realized that truly and honestly, even as a humble reader I will always find a story about a pirate-woman who is half precious metal (Lighthousekeeping) more interesting than one about gay cowboys and their bouncing baby angst (Brokeback Mountain). To me, that is as obvious as pairing bacon with eggs. So I'm going to quit calling my eggs matzo balls, because those just don't go with bacon, children.
The fact is, I'm a fantasy writer. I make up stories about witches and monsters and yes, preaching crocodiles and queer angels. Are they better than "pulp" fantasy? I like to think so. But if you think realism doesn't have a pulp segment, you haven't seen a Nicholas Sparks movie recently. I hope, for your sake and that of your family, that you haven't read the books they're based on. Realism is a restrictive genre with strict rules and conventions - it's fantasy that's free. Nowhere else is the entire history of the world - bull-fuckers, bankers, minotaurs and all - at my fingertips. Realism says I cannot have a dragon if I have a suburban kitchen. Fantasy whispers, "Put the dragon in the suburban kitchen if you want, I'll still love you in the morning."
I am a fantasy writer. I have learned my lesson, and I embrace it.