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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