tripping the heavy fantastic

Tripping the Heavy FantasticJason Erik Lundberg, facilitator

Creative Arts SeminarJC1 Workshop

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Workshop Description A notable trend in speculative fiction of the last 15 years is the tendency toward cross-genre writing that combines the tropes of the realistic and the fantastic. Whether it is labeled as magical realism, fabulation, slipstream, irrealism or interstitial fiction, this type of writing challenges genre conventions and reader assumptions, especially in terms of memory and the perceivable world. Students in this workshop will examine several prominent cross-genre works, examine the effectiveness of this blending of genre tropes to explore the concept of memory, and apply these techniques toward the opening scene of a cross-genre short story.


Contents

•Introduction

•Cognitive Estrangement and the Fantastic

•Slipstream Definition and Examples

•Feeling Very Strange: Worldbuilding and Character

•Synthesis of Premise

•Story Opening


Who Am I?

•Writer

•Editor

•Publisher

•Instructor


From n00b . . .


. . . to published author


Cognitive Estragementand the Fantastic

• Holding two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time (doublethink)

• By imagining strange worlds, we learn to see our own world in a new perspective

• The strange is made normal, and the normal is made strange

• Bizarre, magical, surreal events/people/landscapes are treated as “normal” by the story’s characters

• The real world is not “disrupted” (trad. fantasy/horror); disruption is part of the everyday world


Cognitive Estragementand the Fantastic

• Cross-genre fiction

• Intersititial fiction

• Irrealism

• Magic realism (South America)

• Fabulism

• Fantastika (Eastern Europe)

• Slipstream


Slipstream Definedby Bruce Sterling

This genre is not category SF; it is not even “genre” SF. Instead, it is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a “sense of wonder” or to systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic science fiction.

Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this kind of fiction Novels of a Postmodern Sensibility ... for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books “slipstream.”

—SF Eye, 1989


Slipstream Example 1:“The Healer”

by Aimee BenderThere were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice. Everyone else’s hands were normal. The girls first met in elementary school and were friends for about three weeks. Their parents were delighted; the mothers in particular spent hours on the phone describing over and over the shock of delivery day.

I remember one afternoon, on the playground, the fire girl grabbed the hold of the ice girl’s hand and—Poof—just like that, each equalized the other. Their hands dissolved into regular flesh—exit mutant, enter normal. The fire girl panicked and let go, finding that her fire reblazed right away, while the ice spun back fast around he other girl’s fingers like a cold glass turban. They grasped hands again; again, it worked. Delighted by the neat new trick trick, I think they even charged money to perform it for a while and made a pretty penny.


Slipstream Example 2:“Heads Down, Thumbs Up”

by Gavin J. GrantMrs. Black repeated her question, but then the border wobbled over us again. She sighed. There was a knock at the door, and the school secretary came in.

"Yes, yes," said Mrs. Black before the secretary could say anything. "I know, I know."

She turned to us. "Boys and girls. Two minutes of heads down, thumbs up."

She went to the sink at the back of the classroom and wet her handkerchief. She touched the tops of our heads as she passed, a diagonal line of us whose hair stood up on the backs of our necks. I wanted to be touched. She took her hankie to the blackboard and stretched up to the top corner and wiped her name away. Her name was Ms. Sterling now. I sneaked a look at Jeanine. She'd never learned to sculpt the letter r out from the other sounds. She had her head down, but her eyes were open. She was staring at her math book (we'd have to use the other set now) and her face was slowly turning red. She hated it, too, the change.


Slipstream Example 3:“Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose”

by Kelly Link

Dear Mary (if that is your name), I bet you’ll be pretty surprised to hear from me. It really is me, by the way, although I have to confess at the moment that not only can I not seem to keep your name straight in my head, Laura? Susie? Odile? but I seem to have forgotten my own name. I plan to keep trying different combinations: Joe loves Lola, Willy loves Suki, Henry loves you, sweetie, Georgia?, honeypie, darling. Do any of these seem right to you?

All last week I felt like something was going to happen, a sort of bees and ants feeling. Something was going to happen. I taught my classes and came home and went to bed, all week waiting for the thing that was going to happen, and then on Friday I died.


Slipstream Example 4:“Strange Mammals”

by Jason Erik LundbergThe wombat stood on its hind legs, four feet tall, eyes set wide on its head. Its whiskers twitched as it waited for me to invite it into the apartment, dark brown fur matted in places and twined through with leaves and nettles in others. The animal smelled faintly of fish and vodka.

“So who are you then?”

“My name is Parasch Zee,” the wombat said, its voice full of gravel, and pushed its squat muscular body past me into the apartment. “You will call me P.S.”

“Parasch Zee? That’s a strange name.”

“Not strange for a wombat. Would you rather I be called Craig or Anthony? Now that would be strange. Anything to drink?”


Feeling Very StrangePart 1: Worldbuilding

•Brainstorm for 15 min.

•Think of the worldbuilding details for your story

•What is it that makes it different or strange compared to the “real” world (everyone can fly, animals talk, mushroom creatures rule the world, gods walk the earth, etc.)

•Come up with at least five ideas; write several sentences for each idea


Feeling Very StrangePart 1: Worldbuilding

•Cross out your first two ideas (the most obvious will always be uninteresting, unoriginal, and clichéd)

•From among the remaining ideas, circle the one that appeals to you the most


Feeling Very StrangePart 2: Character

•Brainstorm for another 15 min.

•Think of a character who might inhabit your world

•Is this character emblematic or an exception? What does he/she want most? What is the most important incident in his/her life? What are his/her hopes and fears? How does he/she deal with being in a stressful situation?

•Come up with at least three characters


Feeling Very StrangePart 2: Character

•Pick the character who has the most to lose

•Brainstorm for 5 minutes on the complications that might get in his/her way of achieving was he/she wants most (other characters, bureaucracy, economics, etc.)


Feeling Very StrangePart 3: Synthesis of Premise

•def.: The fundamental underlying concept that drives the plot.

•e.g. Joss Whedon’s series Firefly: "Five hundred years in the future, there is a whole new frontier, and the crew of the Firefly-class spaceship Serenity is eager to stake a claim on the action. They'll take any job, legal or illegal, to keep fuel in the tanks and food on the table. But things get a bit more complicated after they take on a passenger wanted by the totalitarian Alliance regime. Now they find themselves on the run, desperate to steer clear of Alliance ships and the flesh-eating Reavers who live on the fringes of space."

•Background for understanding the story, but is not yet the story itself


Feeling Very StrangePart 3: Synthesis of Premise

•Write for 10 min.

•Look at your chosen worldbuilding and character details

•Combine all these ideas into the premise for your story; often called the “elevator pitch”

•Does not have to be elaborate or even fully thought out yet

•Should involve an element of baring soles/souls


Story Opening

•Start your story with a strong, interesting hook that introduces the protagonist.

•Should include hints of scenery, conflict, genre, tension.

•Does NOT necessarily mean explosions or high drama/action.

•Does NOT give away everything right at the start.


Story Opening

•Your opening hook is a promise to the reader of what’s to come; if you can’t fulfill that promise, you lose the reader.

•The rest of your story must be the payoff that the opening sets up.

•Set up questions in the reader’s mind that will be answered later in the text.


Great Opening Lines

•“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

•“An hour before he shot himself, my best friend Philip Strayhorn called to talk about thumbs.” —Jonathan Carroll, A Child Across the Sky

•"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." —William Gibson, Neuromancer


Writing Exercise

•Write for 15-20 min.

•Look at your premise and all the previous exercises

•Create a solid opening to your short story that introduces your main character, the setting, potential conflict, mood, tone, etc.


Final Thoughts

•Finish your story; with a solid beginning, flesh out your ideas into a complete narrative

•Keep writing; it’s easy to get discouraged, but if it’s something you love, you must persevere

•Read widely: in, out, and between the SFF genres

•Further Reading: A Working Canon of Slipstream Writings & Turkey City Lexicon


Final Thoughts

•Website: jasonlundberg.net

•Also on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, etc.

•Discounted copies of my books for CAP attendees:

•Red Dot Irreal: $15 (reg. $24)

•A Field Guide to Surreal Botany: $10 (reg. $15)

•Both together: $20 (50% off reg. cover price)


Best of Luck to You All


tripping the heavy fantastic

Documents

hand made

cognitive

parasch zee

strange part

strange part

strange part

character

premise