Fiction is a mindfuck. Almost literally. The act of reading is the act of entering another person’s thoughts and going on a guided tour of an alien perspective for a short while. And writing—well, when you write you’re creating a probe that penetrates another person’s mind and explodes in visions and thoughts and feelings that (hopefully) transport them away from the ordinary and towards something that will bring them delight (and maybe something more).
Being a good writer means taking that relationship seriously, and that’s an ethic that’s in short supply these day—a couple weeks ago I published an article about how and why this is.
Hook Me Hard
This piece is long and your email client may choke on it. Read the original at http://jdanielsawyer.substack.com.
I first noticed myself having difficulty finding new novelists who I could trust to give good head-game back in the mid 00s, and the quest has gotten more difficult since then. Most of the good authors I’ve found since then (who didn’t bitterly disappoint me by betraying the premises of their own stories) have written with an eye towards female readers.
While good fiction will generally appeal across gender lines, these are a few of the tells that women, rather than men, are the target audience:
The characterization is thicker than the plot (women tend to prefer interpersonal puzzles, while men tend to prefer external puzzles).
The basic structure of the story follows the heroine’s journey (the story centers around building a team that stands together to repair a broken family and restore normalcy) rather than the hero’s journey (the story centers around overcoming obstacles and growing in power, and once the goal is achieved, life must find a new equilibrium rather than going back to what it was).
The problems that concern the hero/heroine are intensely personal (or personalized) and the politics tend toward the relational, rather than the problems being mostly external and the politics tending toward the strategic.
Moral concerns are framed in terms of what is normative, vs. being framed in terms of what is either effective or noble.
Romance and betrayal are the primary source of lurid material, rather than sex and violence.
And, of course, a very talented writer can serve both masters without short-changing either (see, for example, Shakespeare).
When I started writing fiction with an eye towards making it a career, I had one very simple mission:
Write the kinds of books I was desperate to read.
And me? While I quite enjoy books written for women, I am very much a man down to the tips of my furry toes. I like dark and twisty adventures, high risk folly, complex ethical quandaries, impenetrable puzzles, plots within plots, and hard physical struggles.
And it turns out that I’m not the only one.
Fantasy author L. Jagi Lamplighter has curated a sale for male readers (and women who like male-targeted fiction), which runs through August 5th. The authors are all relative newcomers on the scene, writing for an audience whom the publishing industry has all-but-abandoned to video games.
In it you'll find gobs of science fiction, fantasy, weird fic, and the first volume of my neo-noir techno-thriller series: The Clarke Lantham Mysteries.
Are you, like me, disappointed by the lack of high adventure and challenging themes in your fiction? Frustrated by thin plots? Wanting juicy characters whose journey is an epic struggle, not a therapy session? Worlds where moral ambiguity is a reason to struggle to find what's right, not a reason to give up?
How about a bevy of book-writers whose sensibilities recall the pulp era, but who aren’t stuck in the past?
Well, then, have I got a treat for you!
Check it out here:
