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Literature is of a standard
that requires thought and, maybe a little practice. You'll find in literary
works experimentation with form, with ideas, and with the language itself.
The romance, however, has
not always been the Big Book of Thrusting it's so much become. In fact,
it's one of the oldest genres of fiction out there, beginning in the Middle
Ages when the thought of marrying for love first became popular. And you
thought people only married for money.
Poetry has been around since
the dim red dawn of time, preceding written prose fiction by a good margin.
It's an interesting enterprise.
I think thriller writers give a lot of credit to their readers, allowing
them to make a character into the person who they think he is - who they
want him to be. With questions about the character, the reader can feel
the pain of the action as though it is happening directly to him. And
this is where the suspense comes in.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
was one of the first of its kind, a pioneer, a book whose trick it was
to bring you home by means of disgust, the inability to understand bad
motive and megalomania, and a great Fear of What Could Be When Your Crazy
Neighbor Has a Lab.
Something weird happens, its
origins unknown, and then someone figures out what the hell happened.
One way or another, we need to know what happened.
The stuff science fiction
authors come up with is amazing, the crazy ideas they reach toward; a
suspension of belief is often necessary with these books, particularly
those that offer a completely alternate scientific world.
Could an adventure plot be
plausible on someplace besides regular earth? Can you make a regular story
work on another world? But
I think that's the point of fantasy fiction.
This may actually be the original
pulp fiction - without the noir, of course. Originally meant to be an accounting
of the actual activities of mountain men, outlaws, pioneers, settlers, and
other tobacco chewers, Western fiction began its publishing life as mid-nineteenth
century dime novel, confining these "real" stories to those accountings happening
in Western states from 1860 to about 1900. |
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