Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Hi, I kind of love you.

[captcha: fiscal18.  Going back to that swimming pool idea…]

Excellent.  Point well-made, Candy.

It reinforces what I’ve heard a number of agents say ... agent interest is caught when authors find a way to twist a standard premise.  Success is also in the execution.

Chryssa

That chart is brilliant.

I’d also put forth that Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time will fit into the “A plucky group of ragtag misfits defeat Evil and thus save the world. The short ones provide occasional comic relief. The world is forever changed” category once it’s completed.

I’m amazed this even had to be said.  My sf teacher in the mid 70’s had us combing various sf books looking for the themes that fit into Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces—I think now we were doing unpaid research for his thesis.  One thing it taught me though was the power of repetition (not mimicry) when respectfully done.  It also lead to one memorable argument when I insisted I knew who Luke Skywalker’s father was based on Lucas’ handling of the hero mythos. 

AFAIK no one has compiled anything like HWATF for the Heroine, but from what I’ve read in cross cultural folklore, all of the bits would be present, just dressed differently—after all Cinderella’s glass slipper was originally gold in the Chinese version—which would I think have been no less uncomfortable if less dangerous than glass shoes.

Love the graph. So true.

Brings to mind the Bible verse, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9, NIV)

Dudes, if you wanna do a study look at all the themes from the Bible, and how *they’ve* been ripped off by every author from the dawn of the printed word!

— Bonz

PS: Maybe off topic, but concerning the CE kerfuffle ... what’s happened? Did she get her knuckles slapped? Will there be *any* kind of punishment?? Haven’t heard anything further and makes me wonder after all the heated arguments and discussions, what exactly was the end result??

Candy,

I loved your chart. ‘Twas loverly.

Especially the Dead White Dude category. I consider most of the History taught in schools as being little more than the knowledge of Dead White Men Who Fought and When and Where They Died.

D.S. In regards to the Heroine’s Journey, the classic mythology for women is not the same as the HWATF construct. It is more like the story of Eros and Psyche. Different construct entirely.

Linda

Motherfucking Shakespeare. I’d be his groupie.

Love the chart. I actually laughed out loud.

Candy, you totally rock.

And I echo what DS said…I’m amazed it had to be said.

But you said it so bloody cleverly I want to kiss you.

Love this. It’s made of awesome.

I totally agree. There are only a few basic plots in the world. It’s all about the treatment, and what the writer is trying to say about love or the human condition or whatever. The plot is just a vehicle for all that.

“appear76”—> wow, better break out the wrinkle cream.

I lurve me some Candy.

Thanks for the coffee-snort, Candy!

DS spake thusly:
AFAIK no one has compiled anything like HWATF for the Heroine, but from what I’ve read in cross cultural folklore, all of the bits would be present, just dressed differently—after all Cinderella’s glass slipper was originally gold in the Chinese version—which would I think have been no less uncomfortable if less dangerous than glass shoes.

DS, there’s The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock, that she was inspired to research and compose after a rather unsatisfactory discussion with Joseph Campbell.  There’s also From the Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner, regarding women’s roles in fairytales, as subjects/objects, and as the tellers of the tales.

Awesome chart, Candy.  Truly, you shall rock the halls of jurisprudence!

I met a crazy, poorly groomed woman this summer who said she was going to write a book on the heroine’s journey. Unfortunately, she was, as I said, crazy (she was wearing a tiara and the Evenstar, which wasn’t *that* weird, since we were at a Harry Potter conference, but she said it was what she usually dressed like), poorly groomed (she had a mustache *and* a burgeoning goatee, and oh, how I wish I were kidding), and also unwilling to do her research. (I said that if you want to write about the heroine’s journey in modern fantasy lit, you have to read His Dark Materials. And you really, really do. She was more than a little resistant.)

Hm. My last comment makes me look like the queen of the judgey mcjudgersons, so I must add that I might have found the crazy lady a lovely person, had she not been one of those people who randomly attaches herself to a group of strangers, and proceeds to talk about herself incessantly, with no regard for the flow of the conversation and others’ input.

Anyway. Candy, you are the Goddess of the Comparison Table. You know that, right?

Okay, so I haven’t always seen eye to eye with you, I’m a good friend of Gail Northman’s (always was, always will be) but I’ve got to say -
Respect.
Good post.

It seems both a weird and unfortunate thing that so much of CE’s plagiarism is confused with a) real research of information and b) genuine honest re-workings of prior ideas.

Hi, I kind of love you.

Heh, I was going to say this before I saw you beat me to it, Manon.

What’s up with fantasy writers and short people?

Thank god for people ripping off ideas in Science fiction.

Half my favorite TV shows would have been dead and dull.

Most of the stylish elements in stories would never have been perfected past H.G. Wells.

I think the point is make the idea work better, make the idea shine, give it a different spin and I don’t care.

I read The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock a while back, and I have to say, I was a little disappointed.  It’s clearly well-written, but the focus was too narrow for my taste.  It focuses on the journey of a heroine who denies her feminine side in order to succeed in a man’s world, and then must heal the wound that caused. 

One of the ideas I remember most clearly was the heroine’s choice of the father as the parent to emulate, to the point of denigrating the mother and all she stands for - specifically, those traits seen as inherently female (gentleness, passivity, nurturance, etc.).  Murdock says at one point that the heroine takes on the hero’s journey by making this choice.  The heroine’s journey only begins when she sees this as a mistake and works to repair the damage.

I was frustrated by the lack of attention paid to the journey of women who do not put aside their femininity in order to succeed.  It is a complicated and heroic task for a woman to individuate herself, no matter if she affiliates to her father or her mother.  It is not any easier for a woman to escape from the shadow of her mother than it is the shadow of her father.

*breathes deeply and shakes head*

Sorry.  Rant over.

Murdock’s work is no more complete or all-encompassing than Campbell’s—both have all kinds of holes in them that individuals seeking wisdom and self-knowledge have to fill for themselves. 

It’s a journey, all the same, and YMMV— :)

But both studies are good jumping-off points into further and deeper explorations into the nature of the human spirit, regardless of sex or gender identification.

I had a professor in college who insisted that there only three original plots in literature and two of them were the Iliad and the Odyssey. When I went looking for who originally said this (yay for Google), I discovered that my professor wasn’t the only one. This discussion (and I hope my coding skills are up to par to make the link work) by Richard Young on a creative writing site pretty much sums up the topic.

Candy, I <3 you! You are my heroine, you smart bitch, you!

Wonderful piece, Candy.  But I disagree on one point—Oliver Twist’s got gorm!

For a more feminist orientation in interpreting myth and story, try Jung’s disciple Marie-Louise von Franz or oral-tradition expert Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

All these people who speak contemptuously of romance remind me of the women who say “I’m not a feminist” but then, when asked, express support for basic feminist issues like equal pay for equal work, Roe v. Wade, the ERA, rape shield laws, and so on.

men71—women128 —final score

Thanks for those leads, talpianna—checking into them, now.

Feminist?  Yep, that’s me.

I totally agree. Give me a new twist on an old plot and I’m there. Amazing that this has to be said. Love the chart. All about charts.

” from JR Ward, might write a vampire romantic comedy about a vampire named Hhoratio who used to be a warrior but is now a chartered accountant for Dark Yet Comic Reasons falling in love with the babe in IT”

Could someone write this book? Now?

Yanno, even though you didn’t list it there, I think you finally named a category that Flowers In The Attic fits into—Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away—because damn am I tired of seeing it shelved in romance.  WHAT THE FUCK.  That is not a romance!!!

*deep breaths*

Yes, I read it when I was about 13, and it fucked me up like damn.  I was afraid to so much as hug my brother for a year or so.

You should add everything Terry Brooks has ever written to the “plucky group of ragtag misfits defeat Evil and thus save the world” category.

You said this beautifully—well, hilariously, really.

As another author of fairy fiction that—like Melissa—relies heavily on traditional fairy lore, it irritates the snot out of me when people comment that two fairy novels are the same. No more similar than any other modern reimaginings of old legends are. Grrr!

Still, I think no harm done—the fact of the matter is that no one who was going to pick up Ink Exchange would be dissuaded by reading that article.

That chart?  Yes, it was definitely good for me.  Thanks for the chuckle…

Dead White Dude fiction. Geez, I laughed out loud. This chart is perfect.

I have had it with this motherfucking Shakespeare in this motherfucking Romance!

Liquid awesome, Candy. You’re my hero.

*still giggling at motherfucking Shakespeare not needing a motherfucking classification…

Robert Jordan died a few months back, so alas, for some (including jia, it seems), he won’t be able to complete the WoT saga. Of course, given how people keep buying them and how vastly profitable the franchise is, I imagine it’ll be farmed out for someone else to fill in the generic “band of misfits saves the world” plots.

Nice going Candy, for pinning down the “clueless boy learning l33t skills, coming-of-age and finding he’s king/wizard/whatever” origins.I was talking about just that today, and couldn’t figure out where it started (ragtag misfits saving the world - ding ding, thank you Tolkien… or even Homer, kinda).

The Belgariad falls into that “ignorant boy growing up” genre too. Mind you, all of Eddings’ books (that I’ve read) are paint-by-numbers fantasy, and he seems proud of the analysis he did of the genre to catapult him into best-selling author territory. There’s retelling old tales, or putting new twists and turns in… and then there is regurgitating them ad nauseum.

Dead White Dude fiction cracked me up. I notice there’s no category (I realise they’re not exhaustive) for “sensitive female has vague semi-explained trauma and emotes in a stream-of-consciousness”, mainly, of course, because such fiction generally doesn’t have a story. It apparently has Narrative though.

Joining the chorus to say I love this.

It should be a workshop on creative writing.

Trix: Robert Jordan put together a lot of notes on his plans for the last couple of volumes, specifically so that if he didn’t make it, someone else could finish the series as he’d envisaged it. Not just as a “crank it out” exercise, but effectively as a collaboration. He got all but the last book written himself, and the last one will be written from his notes and partial draft.

from JR Ward, might write a vampire romantic comedy about a vampire named Hhoratio who used to be a warrior but is now a chartered accountant for Dark Yet Comic Reasons falling in love with the babe in IT

Don’t you mean ahccounthant?
But I agree with Miranda, this book needs to be written ;>

>Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away<

That bit just made me laugh out loud. Thanks, that was better than the comics this morning.

Love the chart, but I would have liked to have seen some mystery tossed in there. Mystery readers/writers are a crowd who believe they are above the label of trashy or mainstream or anything that would give them the pulp fiction stamp.

Male mystery writers especially.

Mystery books are probably the most rehashed books out there. Detective solves the case. Policeman solves the case. Doctor solves the case. For any number of murders done any number of ways. It still is: crime committed, investigation ensues, crime solved. Nothing exciting there, if you ask me.

If anything, I think romance and mystery are *very* similar in their mechanics. With a romance we know there will be a happy ending. Just like with a mystery we know the crime will be solved. There is no ‘surprise’ or expectation that the book will turn out any differently than that. But what makes romance and mystery *good* is the part in the middle…how you get to the end. That is where the surprise comes in.

By the way, I would classify GREAT EXPECTATIONS as a romance…you left out that part! That book made me cry, not because of the boy triumphed over adversity, but because of what he learned about love.

Just stumbled across this plagiarism thing and wonder if you ever came across the following instance. Years ago, 10-15 years probably, there was a fuss reported in the British press. A fan had written to a celebrated author. Did he know there was a Mills & Boon romance out that closely resembled one of his novels?
Cue panic at the publishers plus assorted articles in the press. Romance writer’s contract discontinued, ‘serious’ writer vindicated.
But…but…but… it turned out that BOTH writers had taken their plots from an Elizabeth Gaskell novel and the romance writer was telling the truth when she insisted she had never read the ‘serious’ novel. Did the romance writer get an apology? Did she get her contract renewed?
I’ve no idea but I doubt it, after all she was ‘only’ writing romances.
I write romantic comedy (Scuba Dancing, published Transita Ltd) and now cozy crime (Murder Most Welcome, Robert Hale, May 2008). It’s amazing how many people are prepared to admire me for getting published, only to backtrack when they hear the word ‘romantic’!

I luuurve that graph.

GRAPH?! Is that a line in the accountant vampire novel?

I looove dark yet comic. Give me. Please.

And, OMG, Candy. At the beginning of your post, I immediately started thinking about how all the commonalities within any type of genre fiction.

Then you said it all in a brillaint, succinct, hilarious table. Absolutely inspired.

You guys better have a book that’s better than this *is not putting on any sort of pressure. At all*. I’ll have to import it all the way from the UK…

Assorted comments:

Trix, I really liked the original Belgariad.  I thought it was well written and had interesting variations on the traditional themes.  But he just didn’t know where to stop.

I guess my favorite “band of ragged misfits etc.” after Tolkien is Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain.  And he has an interesting twist on “proves to be the rightful king” WARNING. SPOILERS.

Taran becomes king because he’s proved himself capable and worthy.  And the final revelation of his birth is that the wizard found a naked baby near a battlefield, the sole survivor—so there was no way of knowing WHO his parents were.

I think the whole trope goes back to the pastoral romances of the Hellenistic era, where the protagonists are raised by shepherds and turn out to be kidnapped or abandoned royalty (cf. A Winter’s Tale by M. F. Shakespeare), and the fairy tales in which the lazy youngest son wins the princess and half the kingdom.

As for “ragged misfits,”  how about “The Bremen Town Musicians”?

Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away.
My second short story sale was a transcript of a trashy talk show featuring the House of Atreus as the Most Dysfunctional Family Ever.

Christine, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote an essay on why the detective story was the only extant modern form of fiction that followed the strictures of Aristotle’s Poetics.

Point well made. Ideas are ephemeral. No idea is truly original, in a world of 6 billion people, there are bound to be at least four or five who have the same idea.

It’s what you do with that idea, and how you put it together that counts.

I wrote a short story for an anthology, where the writers were all given a story set-up. A gyspy, an enchanted object, a huge fee for the services etc, to try and find true love. We shared research and ideas, yet the stories we came up with were all completely different.

On a side note, it’s very sad that this has happened in the first place. I don’t think there are any winners here.

Gormless boy. Loved it.

But gormless means stupid.

I must concur with putting Flowers in the Attic under the Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away category.  Actually, as soon as I read the I was expecting to see “All VC Andrews” as the next one listed. 

You’ve got to wonder what kind of family that woman grew up in.

VC Andrews- All incest, all the time. WTF was up with that woman and making that a plot point, in like EVERY book?? Has anyone written a bio on her..cuz duuuuuuddeeee… I mean, since she is dead and all…wouldn’t it be about time?

Eddings- Am I the only one here who has a big problem with how his male characters treat just about all of his female characters like wayward children? Even the queens seem to be figureheads, while the men “get things done”. The women are cardboard, for the most part, who tend to toss their hair, stamp their feet and pout, when they don’t get their way.

Charts-mad, wicked cool.

“Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away” addition- Fall On Your Knees.

talpianna, I didn’t mind my first read of the Belgariad either, despite the jaw-clenching sexual politics (which were much worse in later books), but yeah, he certainly didn’t know when to stop. Mind you, people kept buying them.

Meggie, you’re so right about female characters in Eddings. Of course, there’s the other them of the women “managing” the men with their secret womanly wiles rather than just being up front about their aims (cf. Polgara). I find the whole cliched “battle of the sexes” thing tiring in the extreme, in any venue.

Actually, gormless doesn’t necessarily mean ‘stupid’.  A person can be intelligent and still appear gormless.  Think of a dozy shop assistant, looking blankly at you when you ask a question, because his mind is miles away and he has no interest in his work:  that’s gormlessness.  He looks, and is, inefficient at what he is supposed to be doing, but may be perfectly competent in other respects.  A gormless expression is one in which the eyes are slightly unfocused and the mouth slightly open - looks daft, but this may be deceptive.
Most people stop appearing gormless, if they ever did, once out of their 20s.  Any older person who still goes around gormlessly probably IS stupid.

May I say that I love the language tangents in these discussions?

‘cause I do.

OK, not a book but Star Wars episodes 4-6 are right up there with Tolkien as the most well-known “plucky group of ragtag misfits defeat Evil and thus save the world. The short ones (umm, non-human ones) provide occasional comic relief. The world is forever changed.”

Yeah, srsly, what is up with VC Andrews? I picked up Flowers in the Attic in 6th grade (mid-80’s here) and after several books quickly realized that the author was probably fairly intimate (no pun intended) with incest. It creeped me out. It creeped me out even further when I heard she was in her 30’s or so when she started writing the books, and still living at home with her mother. I think there was something, too, about her not going out of the house….I haven’t read them since 8th grade as the subject matter is just really uncomfortable, and the plot is the same for each series. boring. and icky.

Thanks for pointing out the mystery thing! I always use that when someone attacks MY genre as being basically the same book over and over and over just because every book ends with a happy ending. Hello? Are all mysteries the same because every one ends with the mystery being solved? I mean, are Rita Mae Brown’s Jane Arnold books interchangeable with Sharon Kay Penman’s The Queen’s Man books and are both of them interchangeable with The Cat Who books and the Stephanie Plum books?

I don’t think so.

And I don’t think most people would argue that they are (unless they disdain/dislike the mystery genre and so to them the books ARE all the same).

You forgot:

Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling

Scrawny, gormless boy enjoys a series of wacky adventures and eventually triumphs over adversity

YA / Fiction

The table is the best, wish my English teachers had used something similar—would have been more fun.

The Docs over at Teach Me Tonight blog had a similar discussion a few months ago—about how many novels are regurgitations of the same tropes and that people find comfort in that. (Maybe someone who’s tech-savvy would be able to find and provide links to that discussion?)

Speaking of story regurgitations—I discovered P.C. Cast this weekend (“Goddess of the Spring”): it was wonderful. A fresh take on the Hades/Persephone story, with a heroine in her 40s and a not-so-perfect body.

spamword: heavy57. Is that my cue to think about losing my winter weight and begin slimming down for bathing suit season . . .

>Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away<

Candy, how did you read my diary?

Seriously, great chart.  I shudder to think how you’d describe Robert Heinlein’s juveniles…or his other books.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of his, but not a completely uncritical one.

Teddy Pig, you’re right about science fiction.  Taking the classic themes and adding a new twist creates some truly awesome stories.

Sigh.  The older I get, the more I value true originality because there’s so little of it.

First of all, I have to say I found your site today and I found it to be the best source of entertainment I’ve read in years…
Second of all, weighing in on this whole repetitive issue - I am both an author and an editor (for a small e-pub) and I can tell you from experience that publishers want to see manuscripts that are a re-hashing of the old tried and true plot lines. As editor, we categorize manuscripts according to plot elements being existent or not. If certain elements are not in place, then the book is either rejected or “suggestion” made to the author to revise. Personally, I don’t agree with this. As a reader, I don’t want to read the same story over and over again, I want something fresh and unique. As an editor, however, I can see why publishers, especially small ones, only accept the tried and true stories, as they are the ones that are saleable.
Ultimately it is up to the reader to make a change. Only when readers stop buying mass market paperbacks that cater to their desire to see the happily ever after ending and the old boy meets girls stories will books change.
So, yes, I would boycott Cassie Edwards because of her plagiarism - that’s just pure laziness and nothing to be proud of. And yes, as a reader I will refuse to buy the same old boring stories. As an author, I strive to put a different spin on every little subtle plot twist.
And yes, Candy, Shakespeare don’t need no stinkin’ category, he’s in a category all his own.
Thanks for the laughs, girlz!

I read _The Heroine’s Journey_ by Maureen Murdock, too.

Was not impressed.

It is, in fact, a more specific case of the Hero’s Journey—with which I have my arguments, but she doesn’t address them.

For instance, she claims the Heroine’s Journey _starts_ with the Hero’s Journey, but what she is describing is the Ordinary World.  Just because you Do Stuff, you are not therefore on the Hero’s Journey.

Article about V.C. Andrews: http://www.slate.com/id/2179380/pagenum/all/#page_start

She spent most of her life in a wheelchair due to a back injury after a fall down a flight of stairs.

I’ll be back soon—I’m just running out to buy cairngorms for all the gormless guys I know…

over94—-Hey! NO! I just turned 66!

loved the chart… i’ve got a guide to writing science fiction/fantasy book that says pretty much the same thing. but… where’s Guy Gavriel Kay? if ever there was a band of rag-tag misfits, it was the group of Canadian students attempting to save the world in the Fionavar Tapestry.

Emelye, would that be DWJ’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland?  That one always triggers snorting giggles for me—

We need one like that for Romancelandia—

I’ve just finished laughing long enough to type this comment.  Well done.  That chart needs to be required reading for all writers.