The stories she loves most follow other organic patterns found in nature―spirals, meanders, and explosions, among others. Novelist and writing teacher Jane Alison illuminates the many shapes other than the usual wavelike “narrative arc” that can move fiction forward. But if I can’t read experimental fiction and find out how it’s done well, then how am I supposed to write experimental fiction that doesn’t suck? ( Adventure Time.) Also, I want to write it, because I love chucking rules out the window and replacing them with different, arbitrary, funner rules of my own. Which is not to say that I don’t want it. I don’t read much experimental fiction, is what I’m trying to say, because it’s harder to find. If the options are “pick through a gumbo to find the okra” or “just grab a handful of okra,” you can probably guess which I usually choose. I can’t, generally speaking they tend to be literary, and maybe I don’t discriminate between literary and spec fic, but mostly I kind of do, because the SFF at my preferred library branch is all right there in one tidy section, whereas just about everything else will be found in the catch-all FICTION section – the horrors and the westerns and the romances and the historicals and the unmarked plain-ass We’re Just Stories, I Guess novels, in a 10-shelf gumbo. I mean, they would be, if I could ever just find some books that went off the rails a little bit. Rules are equally nonexistent – square, persona non gratis, whatever – when it comes to structure. So there are no rules re: genre, style, story, characters, etc. See also: “The plot was all over the place but the style was to die for.” I’ve loved romance novels, historical fiction, a horror here and there, a contemporary MG, the odd Issue book, all along with my favorite spec stuff. But that’d be a lie, because I can remember, in recent memory, telling someone or saying in a review, “The characters weren’t great but that story.” I say the reverse a lot. I want to say that one hard fast rule is that the characters are great. There are no rules that govern what books I end up feeling fond feelings for.
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