Better Fiction: The Blog

I'm back in China. Not literally, but my fiction has returned there, and it feels good.

After my dramatic blow-up with the speculative genres, I dug out the couple of chapters I had written in what was meant to be a novel set in China. I had abandoned the project but still liked what I had written so far. My current interest in getting back to a mainstream.literary mindset revived a determination to make something of the material, this time as a short story, and so far I think it's going well. It wants to be a crime story, and I'm okay with that.

Speaking of crime: Big Pulp has just purchased my story "Daddy's Will" for their summer issue. "Daddy's Will" is a little mystery I wrote with Roald Dahl in mind. In getting myself interested in a project, style can be as important as anything else, and I often have a goal in mind. With "The Station" (Haruah), I had noticed how Hemingway repeated words, something we usually avoid. In the upcoming "The Foal" (Creative Brothers' Science Fiction), I was pursuing a long-time goal to write something that might be called "agricultural science fiction". That desire grew out of a love for three great animal stories: Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea", Faulkner's "The Bear", and Steinbeck's "The Red Pony". In my estimation, Steinbeck's is the least of three, but it's also the one whose subject matter was most reflected in "The Foal".

I'm also beginning to realize that I have noir-ish feelings about China. "A Picture's Worth" (Distant Passages, volume 1) follows a man's decent toward murder, guided by jealousy and the haunting influence of Feng Shui. "Window Blind" (Mind Flights) had a slightly sci-fi edge to it, and focused on a woman haunted by her own surveillance equipment. As a theme it focused on lives being controlled by fear or love and ends as one of the most blatantly Christian works I've ever written. It is dark and bleak, and I should also not that it is not necessarily set in China. I kept it ambiguous because the point was not to pick on any particular government. My present work, currently titled "Down to the Land of Darkness" is a "Godfather"-esque story of being pulled down (and back) into the world of organized crime.

Can't wait to post the new story at the forum.

Wade Ogletree

Ok, yes, the last post was a bit melodramatic, and it left some people thinking was quitting writing. That was not the point.

I'm changing focus, that's all.

Wade

Here's the thing. I've been fighting an uphill battle, and somewhere along the way I've come to this depressing conclusion: I ain't gonna win.

So, I'm shifting gears. Probably. I'll give it a try, anyway.

I've had some people in mind, people who I saw fighting a losing fight and being drawn down by it. One rather talented writer found himself out of touch with the reading public by at least a hundred years, maybe more. He dug in his heels and ranted and raved about how sick he was with, well, with everything that makes contemporary fiction what it is. He seemed to think that if he complained loud enough, he'd get people to agree with him...and his kind of writing would be popular again.

I think I've been heading in that direction.

I've also been thinking about how I've approached my own writing over the last four years. I didn't want to pigeon-hole myself by deciding too soon that I was this kind of writer or that. Even so, I slowly began to identify myself as a writer of Christian science fiction and fantasy, for the most part. I pigeon-holed myself without really taking a look at what I was trying to do and deciding, honestly, where those efforts would best pay off.

It's time to be honest with myself. In a sense, it's time to quit.

I'm not going to breathe life into an unborn genre, which is to say Christian science fiction and fantasy. I'm not going to fit into the secular mainstream versions of the genre, either. In the last few years, I've discovered more about what I'm trying to say in my writing, and these genres and I simply aren't going in the same direction. At the end, I held out hope for literary fantasy...but even there, at least for now, the hope has died.

More and more, I've become aware that the fantastic was only a tool to open up a story for me, and that I was generally more interested in the characters, in the relationships, and in the here-and-now. I'm not interested in world-building or magic. My work, I saw it as approaching mundane science fiction and magical realism. Sometimes, it wasn't even that.

To my shock, I've discovered a completely different swimming hole to dip my toes in for a while, and I think I'm going to give it a try.

If I'm right about this, when the time comes that I can't resist dipping back into the fantastic, I might even find my brand of it fits a bit better in the world of the mundane. Who knows? Can't hurt to try. I've written my share of literary or mainstream (whatever that is) stories before, and I plan of focusing there for a while.

So, at least for now, I'm quitting the road I'm on.

I'm trying something else. Stay tuned to find out more.

Wade Ogletree

The Holy Grail of American Literature has long been this undefined ideal called The Great American Novel. I assume that other cultures have shared similar goals. In this age of globalization, however, the definition of our pursuits may be ready for a change.

Following the dictum, "write what you know," our stories have tended to be local tales told by local folk. Stories in foreign lands required that one of our own cross the sea to be clueless and lost on our behalf, so that we could discover this new land vicariously through him.

One huge departure from this was the Ladies' No. 1 Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. His Rwanda was brought to us through a woman native to the land, and the stories have proven to be widely popular. The western reader has shown himself ready to embrace the foreign in a sign of what may be literary globalization. The world has shrunk to the point where readers can identify with foreign settings and characters without one of our own leading the way and holding the reader's hand.

The idea behind The Great American Novel, I believe, was not simply a great novel written by an American but a novel that best captured the American experience. Perhaps now we are ready for The Great Global Novel, which could be written by anyone, anywhere, with the goal of best capturing the experience of being human.

This is an idea of importance to me as a writer. So far, I have demonstrated a tendency to set my stories among other cultures and peoples. I have several stories set in Europe, several in Asia, and two in Africa—although one of those does not deal with local people.

Though my initial interest in fiction leaned more toward the fantastic, I have, in the last few years (the mature stage of my writing life) always felt led to keep my fiction grounded, mostly here on Earth and in a fairly contemporary setting. The locales, though, have always changed.

At the time of this writing (this being a reprint), I've had five stories set in foreign nations, four set in America, one set in space, and one totally unspecified.

For the longest time, I gave little thought to this personal trend, but lately I have seen how this could be quite logical in the context of the world in which we live. Whether because of the ease of travel or the speed with which research can be done online, the world is open to the writer like never before.

I've spent about half my life in America's Deep South and half in Southern California. My wife is from Hong Kong. I've done a little traveling in Europe, made a few trips to Hong Kong, and spent a few weeks in mainland China. Still, many times I find myself writing about places I have never been. Sometimes, that can be difficult. I have unfinished stories set in Valencia, Spain; Paris, France; and Vietnam which have floundered due to what I do not know about these areas.

I would also like to write about contemporary Africa and the Muslim world, but, again, I find myself hampered by my own ignorance. In consideration of the idea of literary globalization, I think those limitations highlight the breadth and boundaries of our horizons. We understand more about the world—how we are alike and how we are different. Personally, I find those ways in which we are alike to be much more important than our differences. However, there is still the foreign and the unknown. There are still people in whose shoes I cannot yet walk, not even in my imagination.

Unlike some, I do not long for the death of nationalism. I do not want to see America lose its identity and sovereignty. However, in literature I find no desire to cling to our boundaries and its well-traveled roads. There are lands out there to explore, people to discover. The Great American Novel (or The Great WHEREVER Novel) can still exist in that context, because, however broad our horizons, we still see the world from home, filtered through our local experiences and ideals.

Perhaps that is one of the great possibilities of fiction in our global age. Literature is no longer limited to how we see ourselves. It is now about how we see one another.

Wade Ogletree (This is a reprint from the lost Better Fiction blog.)

A look at Christian Novel Publishers:

Barbour Publishing

I was drawn to Barbour under the idea that they publish mysteries, however, it seems evident that they are focused on romance. They have two mass-market romance book clubs with their own sets of guidelines, but even their main guidelines require that a novel's plot be focused on a romance.

They are looking for books from a Christian worldview, but one that reaches the broadest market possible. Book length should be 80,000 to 100,000 words. Though they claim that contemporary and historical settings will be considered, anything post 1950 "is not of current interest".

I did not look at the separate guidelines for the book clubs.

http://www.barbourbooks.com/writers_guidelines/