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It also explains my own struggles with fiction. Trying to master specific technical skills like exposition, characterization, suspense etc. feels like creating a zombie without life. The missing bit is not skill but that I haven't found a repeatable genre-dissolve/invent pattern.
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In fact the two are orthogonal, and the genre-busting is the more important element. Once you've found a vector of genre-busting to work with, you can work the iterative learning loop and improve all the technical bits, but not the other way around.
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You can see this trajectory particularly clearly in prolific but not technical-genius fiction writers like Asimov. The genre-busting through-line is visible in the canon, and the technical skills steadily improve over decades, until his last books are technically good too
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I think Asimov's genre-busting innovation was to mash up science and history. By contrast, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne novels seemed to be kinda ahistorical. Asimov didn't just invent a time machine concept like Wells. He offered epic histories of robotics, and psychohistory.
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My 3rd story, LEAP, which is also chapter 1 of a stalled novel, I think has both ok technical quality and a genre-busting vector (time travel scifi and identity/consciousness metaphysics). I have the plot worked out. It's just beyond my execution rn
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But back to the general point. My own example makes this yin-yang dynamic (genre busting versus technical perfection) painfully, embarrassingly obvious, but it is visible even at the most accomplished and mature levels of the work of people with way more talent and experience.
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And the funny thing is, I have seen almost no good advice on solving or even acknowledging this problem. 70% of fiction writing advice focuses on tactical mechanics. The other 30% tries to finesse the genre-busting problem with color-by-numbers narrative templates.
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I should add. Simply juxtaposing 2 genres is not a case of dissolving or creating a genre. You could mechanically combine (say) military and romance fiction. That doesn't mean you've mashed them up in a disruptive way. Much "fusion" cuisine fails the same way
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My aspirations in fiction are low. Not shooting for the moon or Nobel quality literature. I just want to write one longish story that both "works" and is technically competent. But there's something here I still haven't cracked. Like Turing wanted AI to beat a mediocre human.
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I think about this a lot too. The challenge with “fusion” is to figure out a way in which the two parts work together to *actually do something*, and not just be one thing in the costume of another. The aesthetics has to go all the way to the *core*
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The smallest unit of creativity to me seems to be “X + Y”. Alien was pitched as “Jaws in Space”. This could have ended up stupidly derivative and lame, but it turned out to be a rich generative concept that spawned an entire perspective. How? Why?
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