I Don't Want to Write the Next Hunger Games

I don't want to write the next Hunger Games...

 ...or  Divergent...

 

...or Maze Runner...

...or Knife of Never Letting Go...

...or Uglies...

...or 5th Wave...

 
 

...Or even Pure (the best of this lot)...

Now, don't misunderstand me: I've read all of those books, and the series they kick off, and I enjoyed all of them. They're good books. That's not the issue.

Let's play a game. Try to figure out which book I'm summarizing:

Adrift in a world decimated by calamity and struggling to rebuild itself, our protagonist must plumb her untapped reservoirs of inner strength and determination as she faces unimaginable obstacles, as well as the inhumanity of the people around here, in her quest to reassemble the shattered mosaic of her past and uncover the dark secrets behind her world's dystopian state.

If you've read all 7 books, you know it's not The Maze Runner, The Knife of Never Letting Go, or The 5th Wave, because they have male protagonists, but other than that? It could fit any of the four remaining choices. And if English actually had a gender-neutral singular pronoun, I could have made it fit any and all of them.

Dystopian stories have their place on YA shelves. I'm not disputing that. But now that the hordes of Twilight knockoffs are finally slinking off to the remainder bin, it feels like dystopia occupies every spot in the entire section. It's what everyone is writing.

And I don't want to write the book everyone else is writing.

My native genre is science fiction, and I gravitate toward YA because I think it's the best genre for exploring how characters form and develop; I just don't want to invest my time and energy creating a world that doesn't work. I'm interested in places different from the scenes of my daily life, but that are also functional on a fundamental level.

The closest I've come to finding the kind of book I want to write is Lauren Oliver's Delirium series, which have a sinister edge to them (people can't feel emotions after they reach adolescence), but also have intact families, a reasonably stable government, relationships that aren't based solely on survival, and a rather low body count.

As much as I admire Lauren Oliver's writing, which really is excellent, her series falls into the "girl book" trope of the protagonist meeting the mysterious outsider and eventually falling in love with him. There's nothing wrong with that kind of plot, provided the girl is actually a character and not just a passive mush receptacle; but it's not the kind of book I want to write.

I want to write about guys.

Guys who aren't action heroes.

Guys who obsess over cartoons and play video games and spend more time scouring the internet for crazy theories than they do working out or getting a tan.

Guys like me, in other words.

So that's what I'm doing.

The Man From Primrose Lane (Sort-of Review)

NOTE: This post discusses, in general terms, aspects of The Man from Primrose Lane you should ideally not know before reading the novel.

A few years ago, I read Long for This World by Michael Byers. It’s about a doctor researching the fictional Hickman Syndrome, which causes cells to deteriorate, making those afflicted with the disorder age rapidly and die before they reach adulthood. During his research, the doctor discovers a remarkable boy whose cells don’t seem to deteriorate at all. This boy could be the key to curing Hickman, and potentially to stopping death itself.

Byers get to the border of some really interesting territory in the book—what if we could life forever?—but instead of exploring it, he stops. The remarkable boy dies, and life (and death) goes on as it always has.

I had selfish reasons for wanting Long for this World to go in a more fantastic direction—I’m writing a novel about a world where people don’t have to die—but I can understand why Byers cut off his plot where he did. If he had not, it would have pushed his novel onto the science fiction shelves, and since Byers teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan, he probably doesn’t want his name to end up there. (I don’t have time to go into it here, but genre writing and MFA programs usually don’t mix.)

I was reminded of Long for this World when I read The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner (I first heard of Renner in the video below, where he explains the book publishing process using Star Wars figures). Renner’s book is about a true crime author’s search for a serial killer, which is, of course, a completely different plot than Long for this World.

The similarity is that Primrose Lane also comes to a point where is could either follow a more traditional story arc or take a turn toward “the genres” (Junot Diaz’s phrase), and where Long for this World stops, Primrose Lane leaps headfirst into crazytown. I don’t mean that as a insult; I rather enjoy leaps into crazytown.

The strange thing is, though, I felt somewhat cheated when I realized where Renner’s book was going. I thought I was reading a straightforward crime procedural, and ended up getting a time-travel saga that plays like a mashup of Primer and Timecrimes, both of which you should watch if you haven't already.

I imagine this is how a lot of people would have felt if Long for this World had followed its eternal life rabbit hole all the way through to its natural conclusion.

The reason for my reaction, I think, had to do with how my expectations had been groomed through the early sections of the book. You don’t find out what’s “really going on” until halfway through the book, by which time I had already decided what sort of book I thought I was reading. (Primrose Lane isn’t being marketed as a science fiction novel, even though it really is; the jacket copy calls it “genre-twisting,” but wisely doesn’t mention which genres it twists.)

I read enough books and watch enough movies that it’s hard to surprise me, so I’m usually grateful when it happens. But when I got to the big reveal in Primrose Lane, I was somehow disappointed to discover I was reading one of “those” books.

I kept going, though, and while I ended up liking Primrose Lane, I’m a little mad at myself for not liking it more than I did, since it really is the kind of book I want to write.

The Marriage of Historical Fiction and Science Fiction

I have never been very interested in historical fiction. For a long time, I thought that was because my interests skewed more toward science fiction, and I thought those two genres were on opposite ends of the spectrum. Historical fiction, of course, deals with things that really happened, while science fiction deals with things that haven’t happened (yet, at least).

I recently finished reading Connie Willis’s novels Blackout and All Clear (both books tell a single story—it’s more accurate to call the work a two-volume novel, except no one writes those anymore). My experience with Willis’s books is making me rethink the historical fiction-science fiction binary.

    

The setup of Blackout and All Clear is that historians at Oxford University in the year 2060 can use time travel to go back and see what life was really like back then. The plot follows three historians who are all studying different aspects of WWII England, especially Germany’s bombing of London. One of the jacket blurbs jokes that the level of period detail will make you think Willis had access to the time machines in the books, and I’m inclined to agree.

I recently graduated from Ball State University with a Master’s in Creative Writing, and one of my professors, Cathy Day, talked about the time and effort it takes to research historical fiction; she wrote about a the origins of her hometown’s circus in The Circus in Winter and is currently working on a novel about Cole Porter’s wife. 

Thinking about the amount of work Connie Willis must have done to get all the details just right in Blackout and All Clear boggles my mind.

The way that Willis evokes distinct time periods in the novels—1940s London and a futuristic Oxford—as well as combines these two genres, has made me realize that historical fiction and science fiction both do the work of world-building. That is, they attempt to flesh out and represent a world significantly different from the world in which the author lives.

The difference comes from how the author constructs those worlds. An author writing historical fiction is bound by how the world really was—the kinds of materials they used for clothes, when a given song was recorded, the dialect and jargon of the period—whereas an author writing science fiction is bound by the particulars of the world they envision—whether time travel is possible, if aliens have visited Earth, what kinds of technology have been invented. Both end up limiting the choices an author can make about the world they create, although the rules for each genre are different.

I’m currently working on a science fiction novel about a world in which a machine allows people to come back from the dead, and noticing the kinds of choices Day and Willis had to make when they wrote their historical stories is helping me to think through all of the little details that will build and define my fictional world.