Is Anything Mysterious Anymore? Guest post by Derek B. Miller

Today I welcome back Derek B. Miller, author of Norwegian By Night, The Girl in Green,  and American by Day.

DEREK B. MILLER:
Is Anything Mysterious Anymore?

I remember when the children opened the wardrobe and found Narnia inside. At the time, and for me, it was beyond imagining what they might find there. I was not reading a story when that happened; I was not entering into someone else's imagination or following a plot that already existed (or, worse, had been read by someone else). I was simply inside Narnia. Being inside Narnia was specific to the story, but the sense of being disembodied and reconstituted in another place — another life — was an instance of what John Gardner called "the fictional dream." The ink, the paper, the words, the gravity … these things all fell away. I was complete and entire and I was there.

The wonder could come from even more modest stories. I remember Bears in the Night — a book with only some twenty five repeated words — and I still remember how outrageous it was that the first bear actually went down the tree in search of that sound out in the woods. That yellow lantern in the woods would symbolize, for me, the ultimate fortitude in facing the unknown.

What I learned from all this, and understand now in a more reflective way, is that there is magic in the world, and some of it is the product of two minds working together — a writer and a reader — to create something neither one could have created alone. That fictional dream is, and must be, a co-production — a co-creation— and is, moreover, one that can never be truly shared. It exists and doesn't exist. It is mutual and solitary. It is social and personal. It embodies a duality on almost every level, and if that isn't magical I don't know what is.

True, I was a child then. These were children's stories. We can chalk up these magical experiences to youth, on the one hand, and the wistfulness of an adult looking back on that youth. And yet.

Even as an adult I can still fall into that fictional dream when I read something exceptional. Sometimes I can do it while writing because I'm a novelist. I still search — and not in vain — for moments of wonder in science fiction, or fantasy, or contemporary fiction.

When I say, "moments of wonder" I am evoking the wardrobe moment. Not only the surprise, but the full loss of one's self into the story. Sometimes, when I'm feeling cynical about the world myself, I think that some writers (and, heaven forbid), some readers have given up on that and have decided to settle; settle for stories that "twist" or narrators who "lie" or thrillers that "shock."

According to back cover of every commercial crime, mystery, or thriller these days, there is someone writing with exclamation points and saying, "lies to you from beginning to end!" whereas the thrillers "slam your head against a wall and leave you for dead!" Apparently — if sales are an indication – people are happy to plunk down their twelve bucks for that. Part of me has to wonder, though: Isn't all of that just a cheap stand-in for the magic? Or is it because we have given up on the magic because nothing is really mysterious anymore?

It used to be that everything was mysterious. Mary Shelley was in Geneva, where I lived for over a decade. She visited Chamonix in France and saw the glaciers there and Monte Blanc; a mountain I have climbed to the top and a glacier I have skied to the bottom. Coming from England, she had never seen anything like that. When Frankenstein chased his monster across the north pole, it was Chamonix she had in mind, and when her readers experienced that, it became the North Pole — a place no one had ever been to in 1818, and wouldn't until about 1908. And even then, how many people would see pictures? That took decades more. Today we can find a picture in seconds.

To Europeans, Africa and the Middle East and Asia were mysterious. The naivety and the ignorance had political ramifications, but it also created new literary possibilities. But of course, that was a two-way street. I toured the Pentagon once, and the tour guide said that in Vietnam, black American soldiers who were POWs were subjected to torture with steel wool and bushes because the Vietnamese were convinced their skin was dyed to make them better camouflaged in the war. They had never seen people of African heritage before.

Once, we were all discovering one another. Now we can Skype to friends or family in Japan, or Chili, or Cameroon on a whim. We still don't all understand one another very well, and our cultural differences remain significant and vibrant, but our friends can flip the cameras around and give us a tour of the neighborhood so we can gain some measure of insight into that.

I'm increasingly of the opinion, as I consider technology and our growing encounters with the world, that the mystery of discovery is giving way to what I think of as the mystery of understanding.

Today, we can observe almost anything. And yet, what do we understand about the world around us? The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once said the purpose of anthropology was to "reduce the puzzlement" of inter-cultural encounter. We needed to reduce it because it was inherent and real and there; because, at a very fundamental level, we didn't understand what people took to be the meaning of what they were doing. We could observe the dancing, or the voting, or the wars, but we could only surmise at the "why." I would say we still don't understand and the puzzlement is increasing because the rate of encounter exceeds our rate of learning.

For some writers and some readers, there will be a tendency to re-trench. To try and go back to the provincial and familiar and find something new there through intensity if not necessarily imagination: more violence, more sadism, more lies, more thrills, more twists and turns in ever-complex plots. The same-old same-old but on steroids. For me, though, I want something more. I want the wonderment. I want the fictional dream. And that direction — at least for me and my sensibilities and curiosities — isn't where I'm going to find it.

What I now think is that, if the mystery of discovery is fading away, then the mystery of puzzlement is what might take its place; a mystery to unravel, and untangle, and try to reach new understandings of brave new worlds that are visible but inexplicable, thereby opening space for exciting and new literary possibilities — new mysteries to solve. The genre, in other words, has a chance to radically grow and evolve. Unless, of course, if decides to cower and flee.

Today, with technology, the wardrobe is becoming real. We can almost literally step through it. If we have the courage to do that and seek new stories and take new risks and ask new questions, as writers and readers, what we might find on the other side could be the greatest mystery of them all.

***

DEREK B. MILLER has worked on international peace and security for think tanks, diplomatic missions, and the United Nations. He is the author of Norwegian by Night, which won the Crime Writers' Association's John Creasey Dagger Award, and The Girl in Green, which was long-listed for the Gold Dagger. His latest novel is AMERICAN BY DAY.

Norwegian by Night coming to the Big Screen

U.K. producers Tracey Scoffield and Frank Doelger are partnering with Germany's Beta to produce a big screen version of Derek B. Miller’s  Norwegian By Night.

Scoffield cites Miller as a writer who offers "the same level of international appeal as Nordic writers such as Stieg Larsson, Soren Sviestrup and Henning Mankell."

Scoffield said about Norwegian by Night: "This is a brilliant story: an action packed thriller with brains behind it - the sort of book a world class director would love to get their hands on."

Read "Are Genres a Help or Hindrance?"  by Norwegian by Night author Derek B. Miller HERE.

Are Genres a Help or a Hindrance? Guest Post by Derek B. Miller

Today I welcome Derek B. Miller, author of one of my top 10 novels in 2013, Norwegian by Night. Norwegian by Night won the CWA "New Blood" Dagger Award. Derek B. Miller is the director of The Policy Lab and a senior fellow with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. He has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Geneva, and an MA in National Security Studies from Georgetown University, in cooperation with St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He lives in Oslo with his wife and children.

DEREK B. MILLER
Are Genres a Help or a Hinderance?

Jeremy Bentham once quipped that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who put people into two categories and those who don't. Aside from being witty, Bentham was also suggesting that to classify is as natural as it is necessary. This was not an unreasonable position for a utilitarian.

From this perspective of he was of course correct. It is natural and necessary to differentiate among things that are different in order to gain some measure of control over them. To observe, to distinguish, to define, to classify, to arrange into formal sets of relationships, to measure … this is the stuff of logic, of language, of science, and it is vital to intellectual progress.

So no argument here on the value of classification.

But then there's art, in particular, its creation and its encounter. Here, logic is not the driver of artistic creation, and too often classifications confuse, obstruct, and puzzle rather than assist the reader.

Take music: An amusing article by MTVIggy (http://www.mtviggy.com/lists/beyond-donk-top-10-most-ridiculous-sub-genre-names-in-electronic-music/) was called “Beyond Donk: Top 10 Most Ridiculous Sub-Genre Names in Electronic Music.” While trying to argue that rock n’roll and disco were “clearly real things with actual stylistic differences,” the writers eventually threw up their hands in frustration with sub-genres (all mysteries to me) called Full-on Darkspy, Splittercore, Cybergrind, and my personal favorite: Illibient.

Like music, fiction books are “art,” (even if sometimes bad art) insofar as they are not created to serve a use other than to seduce, amuse, disrupt, or otherwise stimulate the mind, heart or body of the reader. If we also accept that the reader encounters this work to experience these things, then the relationship between writer and reader is an artistic rather than utilitarian one. Classifications could potentially (and often do) undermine rather than facilitate the quality and frequency of encounter. To be clear, I’m not arguing against art appreciation and the value that can be brought to the reader or listener by a tutored encounter with the material. Rather, I’m arguing against being told exactly what to expect and experience from that encounter.

And yet, that problem of “encounter” is a real one. After all, you don’t get to read stuff at all if you don’t know about it. Systems that facilitate our encounters — without mediating how the material will be experienced — would seem to be what we need. Alas, that’s tricky. Hard to talk about something without saying anything about it. Most of these sorts of people go into politics not publishing …

The need to classify books into genres may in fact be useless to the writer in the creation of art; and detrimental to the reader when encountering and being stimulated by that art; but it is also essential for bringing those two people into contact with one another. What this suggests is that genres and sub-genres (however absurd) will continue to exist and even proliferate so long as they have strategic value in the writer-reader encounter.

But this does not mean that we — as writers and readers — must be passive and compliant. We need strategies of our own because our needs as not the same as those who are trying to bring us together.

First, some advice to writers: Write something good and don't worry about how you might be classified. This is not to be ignorant or defiant. Rather, it’s to say the classification task comes later rather than earlier. What helps in accepting this stance is knowing that you will not be classified the same everywhere. Likewise (and this is key) there is no automatic sorting machine. Different people, different cultures, different languages — hence different markets — will see your work differently which is why your agents and editors and marketing professionals can be partners in placing work. The master move for the author is to become part of that strategic process, not a victim to it.

My own experience is a case in point. My debut novel, Norwegian by Night was published as a crime novel by Faber and Faber in Britain where it won the Crime Writers' Association's John Creasey "New Blood" Dagger. However, on setting out, I had no intention to write a crime novel, per se, nor did I think that was what I was doing. I had written a book that I liked and hadn’t much considered where it might fit into the market.

At first this was a big problem. Many, many publishers rejected my manuscript and some told me flat out that the problem wasn’t the writing but the challenge in selling it. Their existing categories did not accommodate my book. Here, categories were obstructionist in that they prevented the encounter between book and reader.

But later this was overcome by risk-taking editors, and the careful strategic marketing of the book in different markets. The classification of “crime” was not a universal solution. In America and Germany, for instance, it was published as literary fiction. In America the book has received good reviews but sales have been modest in hard cover. Yet, in Germany, it was a best seller for months. So even here, classification was not the main issue.

Not incidentally, one of the most common comments I’ve received from happy readers is how much they’ve enjoyed being surprised by the story and how much it did not fit into any simple genre. Here, the writer-reader dynamic is at its most pure and unmediated. My lesson from this is that writers need to write the story they want to write, and then work with the publisher and booksellers to build a strategy for engagement with readers, not submit to the domination of genres.

And here's some advice for readers (I'm a reader too): Remember that we are all free in mind, heart, and body to experience the richness of the world and to be moved by it. Do not passively accept the classifications given to books. Exercise your freedom of thought to read books the way the authors wrote them and even beyond that. The bookseller-reader relationship is not an adversarial one, but it is a highly imperfect one. Genres are tools and there is no such thing as an all purpose tool. Allow them to serve you, but don’t expect them to. In a phrase, do not go gently into that good bookstore. Rage, rage against the classification of art. Because only then will the art itself survive.