Trails of Literature

There’s an interesting thing about the mountain bike trails in my area: I’ve ridden three (or four if you count my parents’ property) and each place, even though within 30 miles of one another, has a distinctive feel to them. One place has ten to fifteen miles of trails, another seven, a third has near 30 I believe, and my parents have six miles. But I’d be willing to bet you could drop me blindfolded in the middle of any one of those parks, take off the blindfold, and in a few minutes of riding I could tell you exactly where I am.

Okay, my parents’ place doesn’t really count because you could drop me blindfolded into any corner of that place and just by looking around I could tell you where I am. But I don’t know the all the trails of the other three – certainly not intimately enough to know, just by looking around, where I am. And yet, the way the trails are laid, what kind of obstacles they have, what the ground is like – it’s different, and distinct.

I noticed something the last time I was at the nearest bookstore (happens to be Books A Million – much rather have a B&N with a café, but hey…) and was perusing their fantasy section: a lot of epic fantasy books I looked at, by different authors, read a lot the same. Pick it up, check out the cool title, maybe scan the synopsis, flip open to any page, and within a paragraph or two (more, if I’d landed on dialogue) and I could affirm it was, indeed, epic fantasy.

But a literary novel in my hands. I’d be willing to bet, open up to any page and start reading, within a few paragraphs I would be able to tell is was a literary novel.

Romance, obviously, same thing (just look for absurdly detailed emotions).

Christian books – in fiction, it’s probably not terribly well-written (sorry, Christians).

I haven’t perused a lot of sci-fi, but I’m guessing hard SF is pretty easy to spot.

And it’s not necessarily because the characters are named Juorn in one, or they’re somewhere named Atrius V in another (or because it read like that one freshman’s short story that wasn’t really terrible, so you felt bad giving them a negative review – sorry Christians…) but it has a certain feel to it. It’s the word choice, and the syntax, or the gravitas (or lack thereof).

But I wonder, when I see patterns like I do in books like I had, whose word choice it is. Is it possible that each of those authors, on their own with no help from anybody, happened to write entire books that felt like every other book in their genre?

To put it another way: are authors like state parks? Or are they like trail segments within the same park? I’ve always considered them like state parks, and their stories like the trails. Now I’m not so sure.

What I dearly hope is that those similarities aren’t the fault of the editors. From an advanced editing class I took, I don’t think it is.

What I think it is, is the need to get out of your genre entirely, as often as you can. Go ride some other trails somewhere else, before you start building your own. How much more interesting would one trail network be if each trail within it was unique? What if each author in the epic fantasy genre wrote something unique – not just in the story or plot, but in the writing itself? If, instead of identifying the genre within a few paragraphs, you could identify the author?

Maybe those with more familiarity can tell the difference. For someone new to the trails, though, it all rides the same.