I Still Haven't Made It Through Under the Dome

And Steven King's time-travel novel is announced.  It will be interesting to see how he handles the themes.

What is intriguing to me is how many people think that writing outside one's home genre is something readily done.  I encounter it time and again.

"I plan to write an SF novel."

"Oh, have you read much SF."

"No, but I watch movies and TV."

It might not occur to such a one, but that acquaintance is insufficient to sustain a literary work with the specific conventions of a genre.  Many think that they will be ground-breaking and convention shattering, but to shatter conventions, one must know what the conventions are.

All this really has nothing to do with Mr. King's book--it just occurs to me as a result of a conversation that occurred this weekend.

Comments

  1. FredMarch 7, 2011 at 10:52 AM

    Stephen,

    A classic example of that is Caleb Carr. I read several of his mysteries a number of years ago. I thought they were quite good, so when he came out with an SF novel, I was interested.

    It was terrible; it sounded so old-fashioned and so badly written that it would not even have been a decent read in the 1930's when writers were first beginning to develop SF as a genre.

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