Joe Abercrombie defends gritty fantasy

[Nerds_feather]

Thought this was a good read, even if I don't wholly agree with him. (I do agree with some bits, but not others.)

 

[Brian G Turner]

Edited the link to make it correct - will get back to this tomorrow - time for me to clock off early tonight and relax.

 

[Nerds_feather]

Oh, whoops...did I link to the wrong thing? Sorry, if I did (and now curious what I did link to).

It's an interesting read, nonetheless.

 

[Brian G Turner]

You originally linked to the wp-comments.php file (somehow). I'll give it a read later as it's quite long and I have lots of work on today.

 

[Boneman]

Great Link NF (and I Brian) and a great blog by Joe. From a writer's pov this leapt out at me:

But I believe the role of a writer is not to avoid offence. Just to think carefully afterwards and reflect on how you might do better next time. To be assessing criticism and constantly striving to become that little bit less crap. But you’ve also sometimes got to laugh in the face of criticism. Because the role of the writer is also to throw caution to the wind and write the most honest and heartfelt books you can. Better to have a book that many readers love and some find revolting than a book that no one reads at all. Far, far better.

If you don't throw caution to the winds when you actually feel the need, then you'll end up writing sterile, stilted work... and if you don't, then you've no chance of doing better next time, because there is no better, if you can't see past that.

Should this be in Joe's Threads?

 

[Brian G Turner]

A general an interest post - really good reading.

The only points I'd make are:

1. Realism is one thing, but I think any serious fiction, in any media, needs to avoid outright "blood porn".

2. GRRM based ASoFaI on the War of the Roses - but the characters and violence are highly exaggerated. Read "The Sunne in Splendour" by Sharon Penman and you can see Ned, Robert, and Cersei - but there is no Joffrey, Ser Gregor, or Bolton, or anything remotely like them - nor, do I think, would their actions ever be accepted. We might see one or two in history, but together in the same period - no, that's not realism - but then, they are designed to provoke an emotional reaction from the reader, much in the same way as a meddling gossip might in a soap opera;

3. I think fantasy is becoming a broader genre, not simply in terms of subjects, but especially in terms of reader. Simply put, I think more and more people are turning to fantasy, and more importantly, finding what they want to read. As geek has gone mainstream I think scifi/fantasy has, and readership will contine to grow. It won't do that if fantasy does not develop as well.

 

[Kissmequick]

I think Grimdark is a perfectly valid choice

But I also think that it can, like everything else, be abused -- stuff put in there JUST to be 'edgy' 'OMG I am so dark' or whathaveyou. Dark for dark's sake, not anything else. That feels cheap and nasty, and I put the book down.

I don't, personally, think Joe does that. But I certainly get that vibe elsewhere, you know?


Slight tangent (and personal preference) Also I think that implication and subtlety can work much more wondrous horrors than explicitness. An implication is/can be much more disturbing than one that is given to me in a blow by blow detail that leaves nothing to my imagination. Because left to itself, my imagination will conjure the worst horror to me, which I can almost guarantee is worse than the one on the page.

 

[Ursa major]

- but there is no Joffrey, Ser Gregor, or Bolton, or anything remotely like them - nor, do I think, would their actions ever be accepted.

We may not know all of their names, but just in the last century there were plenty of people like this. How else can we explain the piles of the dead, numbered in millions, in the USSR, in Nazi Germany, in Cambodia, in the Congo and Rwanda, and (in lesser numbers) in many more countries? How can we explain the labour camps, gulags and extermination camps? It's highly unlikely that the kind of people who (under the right circumstances) implemented all that in the twentieth century were not around in centuries before, during war, colonisations, slaving, and other varieties of breakdown in society.

This sort of thing may or may not have happened during the Wars of the Roses, but Westeros isn't the England of that time, and GRRM is under no obligation to be faithful to the politics of that time, let alone to the wider society of those days.


(As I've said elsewhere, I think GRRM is showing us that war has terrible consequences and, if I read the man correctly, might feel he was letting us down if he did not show us the horror of these, particularly to readers in the English-speaking world, whose countries have, thankfully, been spared being occupied by the armies of voracious dictatorships in recent centuries.)

 

[Anne Lyle]

...they are designed to provoke an emotional reaction from the reader, much in the same way as a meddling gossip might in a soap opera.

GRRM has a great deal of experience as a TV writer - of course he knows exactly how to manipulate his readers' emotions.

Also, fiction is by definition not realistic. The author selects which elements to focus on and which to omit, in order to put the story across in the most vivid and coherent way possible. Otherwise it would be a tedious catalogue of people sleeping, eating and going to the toilet!

 

[Joe Abercrombie]

A general an interest post - really good reading.

The only points I'd make are:

1. Realism is one thing, but I think any serious fiction, in any media, needs to avoid outright "blood porn".

2. GRRM based ASoFaI on the War of the Roses - but the characters and violence are highly exaggerated. Read "The Sunne in Splendour" by Sharon Penman and you can see Ned, Robert, and Cersei - but there is no Joffrey, Ser Gregor, or Bolton, or anything remotely like them - nor, do I think, would their actions ever be accepted. We might see one or two in history, but together in the same period - no, that's not realism - but then, they are designed to provoke an emotional reaction from the reader, much in the same way as a meddling gossip might in a soap opera;

3. I think fantasy is becoming a broader genre, not simply in terms of subjects, but especially in terms of reader. Simply put, I think more and more people are turning to fantasy, and more importantly, finding what they want to read. As geek has gone mainstream I think scifi/fantasy has, and readership will contine to grow. It won't do that if fantasy does not develop as well.

Just to respond to Brian's points above.

1. Probably more or less everyone would agree that we can do without the excessive, the superficial, the gratuitous. The problem comes when you try to define what that means, or to put actual books or scenes into one of those categories. Quite obviously, these are all subjective judgements. Some people might find any kind of depiction of sex totally beyond the pale. Others might feel that there's some intrinsic value to simple shock value and a pushing of the envelope. Anyone read Splatterpunks? Others might just quite like 'blood porn', for the sake of it.

2. Not to say that the middle ages were an endless catalogue of horrors, but I'd strongly agree with Ursa Major that extremes of brutality on a horrifying scale have been common throughout history. The Wars of the Roses may have been relatively restrained, but Towton is still the bloodiest battle on English soil. The crusades were full of extremes of violence including such noble moments as the sack of Constantinople and the massacres at Acre and Maarat, after which the pope had to write a letter imploring the crusaders not to eat any more civilians. The thirty years war depopulated huge swathes of Germany. That's before we go anywhere near the horrors of the 20th century. Clearly people are also capable of heroism, nobility and chivalrous behaviour, but epic fantasy has tended in the past rather to focus on those aspects of warfare. It doesn't seem surprising, or unreasonable, that gritty fantasy tries to redress that balance. No book is about everything, after all, and every book is in conversation with those that have come before.

 

[Nerds_feather]

Just to respond to Brian's points above.

1. Probably more or less everyone would agree that we can do without the excessive, the superficial, the gratuitous. The problem comes when you try to define what that means, or to put actual books or scenes into one of those categories. Quite obviously, these are all subjective judgements. Some people might find any kind of depiction of sex totally beyond the pale. Others might feel that there's some intrinsic value to simple shock value and a pushing of the envelope. Anyone read Splatterpunks? Others might just quite like 'blood porn', for the sake of it.

2. Not to say that the middle ages were an endless catalogue of horrors, but I'd strongly agree with Ursa Major that extremes of brutality on a horrifying scale have been common throughout history. The Wars of the Roses may have been relatively restrained, but Towton is still the bloodiest battle on English soil. The crusades were full of extremes of violence including such noble moments as the sack of Constantinople and the massacres at Acre and Maarat, after which the pope had to write a letter imploring the crusaders not to eat any more civilians. The thirty years war depopulated huge swathes of Germany. That's before we go anywhere near the horrors of the 20th century. Clearly people are also capable of heroism, nobility and chivalrous behaviour, but epic fantasy has tended in the past rather to focus on those aspects of warfare. It doesn't seem surprising, or unreasonable, that gritty fantasy tries to redress that balance. No book is about everything, after all, and every book is in conversation with those that have come before.

Hey Joe,

I liked the post a lot (and also thanks for linking up to the one I'd written). I do think there's an inherent problem to your argument in #1 here, though. There may not be an "objective line" delineating the meaningful from the gratuitous, but that doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't use logic and reasoning to determine where that line is located for a given work of fiction. And that line doesn't need to be located in the same place for everyone--that's why we discuss and argue it in places like this. Ideally everyone listens to each other and we're all better for the experience

As for #2, I don't think anyone with a sense of history would deny that the Middle Ages were violent. I think, though, that some people have the false sense that violence is all there was to the Middle Ages. As you say, "grit is a tool in the writer's arsenal." And it's a potentially effective one. But if it's the only one, you end up with a one-note symphony that isn't terribly realistic.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I told my girlfriend that before she reads what I've been working on, I'd like her to read a couple of modern fantasy novels so she could understand the context I'm aiming for, specifically George R R Martin's Game of Thrones, Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora, and Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold.

She didn't enjoy Game of Thrones, specifically the violence against women; she didn't feel emotionally engaged in Lies of Locke Lamora.

I thought she might find the Abercrombie a bit too violent, but she's actually really enjoying it. The point she makes is that it's not gratuitous, there's meaning and purpose in it all.

I thought she might be squeamish at the first revenge murder, but she found the issue of the fingers poignant, not least because it didn't heal Monza in any way. She also really enjoyed some of Friendly's observations.

She likes the fact that there's a depth between every action: a reason, a motivation, and even better, that the characters have an emotional level that means they can be related to and understood.

Note that there is violence and killing in most fantasy novels, but traditionally the moral consequences are never examined, which is where I think Best Served Cold particularly excels.

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

As a reader and a writer I gotta say the grimdark blood-soaked nastiness of some recent fantasy is completely off-putting to me. If I wanted to read about senseless massacres, endless blood soaked feuds, petty dictators driving their country and people into the ground, perpetual war, the inherent pointlessness of life, how life is brutal meaningless and short, how the worst rise to power while the best are jailed or murdered, rape and tortute for fun and profit, how the bad guys are treated as heroes and the good guys are door stops jokes or worse, I'd read a bloody newspaper. I read fantasy to escape all that. I don't read fantasy to be reminded how shitty life is sometimes. And certainly not to wallow in it as if it were somehow edgy. Toss all that. It's to the point where this stuff appears to be a parody of fantasy.

Joe, thanks for the years of hard work and practice you clearly put in to hone your craft, we need more. But sorry, I can't stand the extremes of moral ambiguity so prevalent in the "gritty" movement.

 

[Nerds_feather]

I also think it's important to be clear that "grit" can mean different things.

1. A "shades of gray" moral scale, where no one is wholly good or wholly bad.

2. A generally pessimistic or cynical worldview, beyond just gray morality.

3. A tendency to favor dark and troubling subject matter over alternatives.

4. A lack of neat or tidy or reassuring conclusions.

5. High levels of violence, cruelty, gore, etc., seen as "excessive" by some

Many people who complain about "grimdark" or "gritty" fantasy are narrowly complaining about #5, and not #s 1-4.

Others are complaining about #s 1-4, but these complaints are not necessarily the same as those strictly complaining about #5.

 

[ratsy]

I must say when I first picked up The Blade Itself I had no idea what I was getting into. It quickly drew me in and I loved the fact that the characters were so diverse. It was refreshing, and in a time of new authors taking over Joe Abercrombie stood out to me as a front runner. I did not find his work too brutal at any point. His characters were realistic in their setting and never felt like they were doing or saying anything they shouldn't. Of course now I have read all of his books and I think they are getting better as they go.

I understand that life is tough and reading is an escape but a good book is a good book. I have not read much "Grimdark". I would think that Paul Hoffman's Left Hand of God might fall under this and I had a hard time reading that book, for some reason I picked up the second in the series a couple years later and put it down soon after. I do have a problem with a MC who has no emotion or reasoning behind what they are doing. If they kill hundreds of people just to kill them and feel nothing about it then it is not for me.

Another one in this category might be Mark Lawrence who has been a hot topic on this site. Again, I think I understood the character more in this and it didn't bother me much. I am re-reading Lord Fouls Bane by Donaldson right now and the rape scene in that is far more disturbing than Lawrence's.

So I think the writer is the one who can make "Gritty" good or bad and it comes down to characters and their believeability.

 

[Mark_Lawrence]

I also think it's important to be clear that "grit" can mean different things.

1. A "shades of gray" moral scale, where no one is wholly good or wholly bad.

2. A generally pessimistic or cynical worldview, beyond just gray morality.

3. A tendency to favor dark and troubling subject matter over alternatives.

4. A lack of neat or tidy or reassuring conclusions.

5. High levels of violence, cruelty, gore, etc., seen as "excessive" by some

Many people who complain about "grimdark" or "gritty" fantasy are narrowly complaining about #5, and not #s 1-4.

Others are complaining about #s 1-4, but these complaints are not necessarily the same as those strictly complaining about #5.

See, here we have a list of things people may or may not like in a book. And I suppose, if they don't like them and they are present in a book then they may 'complain'. That complaint though would be by way of saying 'I'm not enjoying this book. I'll read a different one.' They're no more complaints than me saying I don't want to read about teenage romances in a school setting or corporate power politics in an office setting... I won't read those books.

Where I lose touch with this is the part where it becomes anything other than someone saying I prefer different (or slightly different) sorts of stories. That's fine. Go read them.

Complaint - as described by Joe and witnessed by me - is more than that though. It's people coming along and saying don't do that, that's wrong.

Perhaps I've misunderstood? Are the people complaining about any of 1-5 really expecting writers to change what they're writing to please them?

Should I find the writer of the school-based teen romances and complain that I don't like that sort of story and they must write another? I'm sure I have the wrong end of the stick. What does the other end have written on it?

 

[Nerds_feather]

Mark,

There's an obvious difference between:

A) "liking" or "disliking" (alternately, "praising" or "criticizing") X in book Y

B) "complaining about an over-reliance on" or "making a case for the intellectual/artistic justification of" X as a general trend in fiction category Z.

Joe Abercrombie's "pro-grit" post is very much in category B. Aiden Moher's very positive review of your book, by contrast, is an example of category A.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

i agree with this, Mark. My take on yours - and other - books were that, much as I thought the writing was excellent and the close pov something to take crib notes from, as a book it was too unremitingly dark for me (and as you say, it is a reader's preference as to what they like) and I like something with more fleshed out secondary characters, which is not what you wanted to do, I'm assuming, from your response to me on another thread.

To knock dark fantasy and say there is no room in the market for it is like saying there's no room for horror. Some of us like dark, and some light, and it's up to the reader what they pick up. Otherwise that way lies censorship, and I, for one, would rather have books that challenge and are my choice, than no choice.

That Prince of Thorns wasn't for me is something we interacted about elsewhere, and comes down to reader demographics, but without varied readers we'd all be stuffed and writing the same book.

 

[Nerds_feather]

To knock dark fantasy and say there is no room in the market for it is like saying there's no room for horror. Some of us like dark, and some light, and it's up to the reader what they pick up. Otherwise that way lies censorship, and I, for one, would rather have books that challenge and are my choice, than no choice.

I don't see how "censorship" is an issue here, unless you're talking about "market censorship" in the sense of publishers/agents only picking things that fit a pre-determined model of what's "publishable" (and even there I'm not sure whether it's relevant).

Free speech, after all, also includes the freedom to be highly critical, and readers have the right to challenge authors or publishers as much as authors and publishers have the right to challenge readers. I assume you agree with this, but I feel like it needs to be restated.

One thing that I think has gotten lost in this conversation (and the related ones), though, is the incredible value of these conversations. We all can, and should, learn from these interactions--the ones between authors and critics, authors and readers, critics and readers, readers and other readers, etc.

One thing I loved about Joe's post was how clear a case it laid out for "grit" as an effective tool in writing fantasy. I don't (and assume you also wouldn't) necessarily agree with every argument he makes, but I do feel the wiser for having read them. Judging from the post's setup, I think it's safe to assume it would not have been written if not for his having read several articles that outlined positions he took issue with.

 

[Mark_Lawrence]

i agree with this, Mark. My take on yours - and other - books were that, much as I thought the writing was excellent and the close pov something to take crib notes from, as a book it was too unremitingly dark for me (and as you say, it is a reader's preference as to what they like) and I like something with more fleshed out secondary characters, which is not what you wanted to do, I'm assuming, from your response to me on another thread.

Very true. I'm constantly surprised when people complain about a book as if the author has failed in some simple task when the truth is that the author has just chosen to write something different.

Almost those exact words came from the mouth of an NYT bestselling author who happened to be sitting on my sofa this afternoon. He said (ish) 'do those bloggers expect me to slap my forehead and say doh, I see it now?' When the truth is clearly a choice to do it a different way, not a failure to do it that way.

You're entirely correct. We had a mismatch of tastes. I didn't fail to flesh out secondary characters. If I rewrote the book I wouldn't learn from your dissatisfaction and make more of them. I chose to put the focus on the PoV in the ratio I did and for you it wasn't ideal. Kudos & thanks for seeing that.

To knock dark fantasy and say there is no room in the market for it is like saying there's no room for horror. Some of us like dark, and some light, and it's up to the reader what they pick up. Otherwise that way lies censorship, and I, for one, would rather have books that challenge and are my choice, than no choice.

That Prince of Thorns wasn't for me is something we interacted about elsewhere, and comes down to reader demographics, but without varied readers we'd all be stuffed and writing the same book.

I can only applaud you.