It is one of the more peculiar symptoms of those afflicted with Art that they must spend at least as much time talking about it as making it. Now, if you’re at all familiar with anyone living with the condition of Art, you’ll know this often takes the form of deep and serious discussions with other sufferers on varied topics ranging from What Is Art to What Art Is. If they’re lucky. It does get worse, sometimes the proportions are more extreme, such as if you’re teaching an MFA program, but almost all of us with the illness spend some substantial portion of our time doing it. Having said all this about discussions of What Is Art, consider this your final warning, for we are now about to launch into a What Is Article.
The questions of what constitutes science fiction and fantasy have long been hotly debated, with definitions and counter definitions flying back and forth between writers, editors, and aficionados like accusations. There was a time when, in order to be a science fiction writer, along with unfinished manuscripts and a stack of self-addressed stamped envelopes, you needed your own definition of science fiction. Everyone was getting into the act, from Asimov to Heinlein. It was the original trending topic on Twitter X Whatever It’s Called Today. Things admittedly got a bit out of hand, at one point Damon Knight offered up the entirely correct but equally non-definite definition of “Science fiction is what we point to when we say it.” Which sounds almost exactly like former Justice Potter Stewart’s now-famous assertion about pornography “I know it when I see it,” thereby confusing legal casuals everywhere as to whether the Jacobellis vs Ohio pornography suit was in fact about science fiction. One thing everyone seemed to agree on, however, was that in order to be science fiction, the thing needed to have some kind of science in it, although some people are still arguing about how much. And what “science” is. But there was—and remains—a consensus on one thing at least: the content of the story itself determined whether it was in fact, science fiction. Or fantasy, when discussing things done via magic rather than science. Either way, the principle remained intact. It even held when discussing stories that managed to be a bit of both. How you wrote it certainly mattered at a qualitative level, but what truly determined the way to judge the shelf on which the story should reside was the unassailable content of the story itself. In the spirit of Damon Knight, “The what of the story determines what kind of story it is.”
While we’re talking about truisms, horror comes to the party armed with several of its own, chief among these the one about “in the right hands, anything can be horror,” a claim which is often extended to humor as well. It is also, at least slightly, untrue. Discussions of horror are seldom very horrifying, and discussions of humor are rarely funny, at least deliberately. Yet, upon examination, there’s still a good deal of truth to horror’s overarching notion. So many of the best horror writers have made an art out of turning the commonplace and unremarkable—a sleepy Maine town, a house, an acquaintance’s heart—into something much more bloodcurdling. This phenomenon operates at even more granular levels. Take the jump scare, that oh-so-basic component of so many horror stories. So much of it depends on the transformation of the most mundane acts (climbing the stairs, opening a closet, turning around) into moments of sheer pants-wetting terror. Even kilt or dress. Yoga pants. Which in turn has led to not just some of the most iconic moments in the history of the genre, but also some truly fascinating and thought- provoking niches and subgenres of horror in their own right. For instance, there is a whole set of Japanese stories, of which the movie Ringu (リング) and its sequels, based on the novels by Koji Suzuki, are probably the best known, which focus on making everyday technology—from a phone to a videotape and so on—a source of abject horror. And this is without even including customer service departments. This is but one example of the transformative quality of horror that so many fans enjoy immensely about the genre. What we see emerging through all this is a fascinating mirror image of the science fiction-fantasy classification rule, where how a story is written goes even further towards determining its shelf classification than even what it is about. When we extend this lens to the humorous side, we find that like the fantasy corollary for science fiction, this one also passes the truth test. A whole lot of things that shouldn’t be funny can be made funny in the hands of a skillful writer, for reasons that can be entirely divorced in the moment from plot, and we enjoy them making us laugh when we probably shouldn’t be, so much that we even invented a whole classification called Black/Dark Humor for those stories.
So we have a pattern, one of content genres and treatment genres, where a science fiction or fantasy story is one in which, if you took away the “what” of the story, the science or magic, the rest of the content would not hold up, and a horror or humor story is one in which if you took away the stylistic “how” of the story, the comedy or horror underlying and surrounding the events themselves, the treatment would not hold up. Touch vs Feel, if you want another analogy. It also bears mentioning that if all the above terms seem somewhat reductionist that’s because, like all classification, they inherently are.
None of this is to say that plot is secondary for a horror or humor story, because that is untrue—your plot remains the backbone of the story. So, what’s the flipping point of all this, you might ask? How does it help you, the writer, or even a reader interested in the nuts and bolts of writing? It doesn’t change how you research, or even how, but it’s sometimes instructive when writing a funny or scary story to be able to take some of the pressure off yourself to come up with plot event after event that makes your readers laugh or cry out, and remember that you can achieve many of the same effects with the feel and vibe of what happens. Defining what you do is also pretty helpful at using pace to achieve plot objectives in the short term, drawing out or quickening the progression of events to maximize “feel.” On the other hand, if you’re writing science fiction or fantasy, using treatment or feel elements at carefully selected moments to channel scary or funny moments within your story gives a tool to do these things besides plot in ways that do not compromise the overall drive and direction of your story. See? Clear and easy.
Or … you could decide that your local writers’ gathering could use some livening up, call everything substance vs style, refuse to mention you’re using the terms purely from an academic classification standpoint, and watch the ensuing bloodbath. If spreading mass dissension is your thing then you could even do it on social media. Although as has been mentioned before, there are few things writers love more than talking about writing with other writers, especially if this helps them not have to think about what they’re currently supposed to be writing, so they really might thank you for distracting them from their own WIP troubles. Even if it’s just to argue about where that book will be shelved when it’s finished. Every bit helps.
And after all, isn’t helping other artists the very definition of what a Good Art Friend is supposed to do?
