curious
ozarque has recently posted some science fiction that takes the form of imaginary interviews. She has previously posted glossary stories also.I'm a big fan of poetic forms, especially the complicated ones like villanelles and sestinas. In fiction ... I'm not sure yet. I'm curious about nonstandard forms but they're kind of hard to find. I do like well-done epistolary stories. One of my favorites was a pastiche of children's letters to a museum, entitled "The Room with the Moa That We Aren't Supposed To Write About."
But there are a couple of problems. 1) It's harder to find lists of nonstandard fictional forms, and instructions on how to write them. 2) Many editors simply won't consider them. Never mind whether the piece is well-written or not: it's often not allowed to compete, but rejected as "not a story." It's very frustrating both as a writer and a reader, because it leaves very few places where one can find nonstandard forms of fiction.
Well, the editors are half right; some nonstandard forms aren't actually narratives, and a story is most essentially a narrative. But they're not poems and they're not nonfiction either, and they are literature. I've used the term "demi-fiction" for imaginary materials that are not stories but rather the nonfiction of their homeworld: otherworldly plant guides, for example. For things that tell a story but not in a narrative way, perhaps another term could be coined, like "quasi-fiction." That might make it easier to get such things into print, if it discouraged the tendency to apply apple standards to oranges.
What other nonstandard forms of fiction are people aware of?
July 10 2007, 18:22:24 UTC 13 years ago
David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries is in the form of a museum exhibit guide book, complete with plugs for reproductions on sale at the gift shop.
There are a few stories that are simply conversations without any exposition or conventional narrative whatsoever. Terry Bison's short story "They're Made Out of Meat" is an excellent example of the type.
My kids loved the children's book The Jolly Postman, with actual removable letters, postcards, invitations and so forth that the postman delivers to and from fairy tale characters.
Then there are six-word-stories, such as "For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn."
When I was in graduate school I wanted to write a "novel" that would be in the form of a shoebox full of mementos: old greeting cards, postcards, saved letters, a torn photograph, ticket stubs, etc. There would be no necessary order in which the reader would examine each thing, but they would, in their entirety, tell a tragic story.
July 10 2007, 19:39:28 UTC 13 years ago