Will the Fashion for Gory Murder Last Forever?

(Maybe.)

Seeking advice from my collection of ideas for this column, I opened up the relevant file and found that the topics not yet used tended to be rather on the obsolete side. Which is the idea of today's advice from the “old(!) guru(?).” Namely, when writing fiction, beware of quick decay of your subject matter . Also of slow decay, but that's different.

What's doomed to turn passé soon, however, isn't always easy to judge. To take an example from my own inexperience, in a certain novel (which by this time you ought to have read, so that I shouldn't have to name it) we have a lady announcing to her friends that the people who have captured them all are mistaken in their judgment of the second amendment to the constitution, which she claims should be interpreted literally, including the part about the need for the nation to preserve a well-armed militia, and therefore doesn't really give carte blanche to just anybody who wants to own just any kind of weapon. Her opinion agrees with a number of court decisions up to that time. Since the book came out, no less an authority than the US Supreme Court has announced that the lady was in error. That body says the reference to a militia was only put into the text for the fun of it, so that the right to bear arms has no relationship with militias. My subject matter decayed instantly. The book is still in print, however and you can still buy it, if you neglected to do so until now. I haven't taken the theoretically possible step of deleting the lady's claim. (Nor intend to, since I still think she was perfectly right about it.)

A very common slip-up of this type is to create a character who is passionately devoted to a certain (clearly non-fictional) musical celebrity. One whole series that I otherwise enjoyed does this, and not only had I never heard of that musician, but when I eventually decided to look him up, I found he'd been like a meteor: very fashionable during his fifteen minutes of fame, then dimmed entirely except to a few of his fans. Okay, it didn't spoil the stories for me—or at least only a little bit, but that little bit was unnecessary. The stories would have been even slightly more fascinating without the clumsy intervention of the author's completely irrelevant private hero-worship.

Of course, in my own previous column here, I referred to a poem by T.S.Eliot, and, come to think of it, I wonder whether readers of Mysterical-E have ever heard of the man—or of the poem I mentioned. Mea culpa , if you want to look at it that way.

And (also “of course”) one has to decide whether one is writing for the quick consumption of a band of right-thinking people (i.e. people whose preferences and prejudices are pretty much in agreement with one's own) or whether one hopes the work will stay available and enjoyable long enough for a more expanded readership—possibly even a full generation of readers. But why give up on readership? The old argument, “Shakespeare made it; why can't I,” comes to mind. For some reason, some people are willing to do work in order to understand passé references in The Bard's work. Yet, for some other people, even just reading Lamb's “Tales from Shakespeare” involves too much of living in the past. (Oops! Another obscure reference! Will I never learn?)

So if you write as if the attempt to pass non-partisan bills in Congress is an on-going thing, be careful how you do it. By the time you see print, people will have forgotten that such a thing was ever tried, and you'll mystify people right out of your fan-club.