Taste is a Strange thing

Lately, I’ve been on an old west kick.

I’ve started listening to a lot of country music, I just read Cormac Mccarthy’s Blood Meridian, I’ve become slightly obsessed with the series 1883, have since moved on to its successor 1923 (which isn’t as good) and as if this wasn’t a heavy enough diet of horses, dogs and guns, I recently watched Killers of the Flower Moon as well.

Initially, I thought this wave was kicked off by the country music thing, but reading back on some of my yet-to-be-released short stories, I can see a southern twang creeping into my writing voice in extracts that pre-date that discovery. Something was priming me for this, whether I wanted it or not.

The origins of this are all a bit random and I’ve given up any attempts to pin down a catalyst for this shift in my taste.¹ But all this floundering hasn’t been in vain: while doing my best to dissect this new fascination with the old American West, I’ve been engrossed in a lot of thought around the function of aesthetics in art, so that’s where I’ve decided to direct things today.

A Shared Milieu

Blood Meridian was written in the 80s. It’s a dark, near-biblical fever dream of violence, filled with symbolism and nods to religious and non-religious archetypes.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a major studio production dissecting the sordid past of a nation through a contemporary lens. Perhaps the last hurrah of Martin Scorcese and the medium of feature films themselves.

1883 is a TV series in the modern mould. Long-form, clever writing; cinematic and built for a contemporary audience.

And last of all, the current country music wave: Your Zach Bryans, Tyler Childers and Colter Walls of the world, are creating just that, music. Sure they all include southern, rural themes, but that’s where their connection to the above examples ends.
This doesn’t matter though.

While each of the above comes from a different angle to the example before it and branches off in varied ways to the one that comes after, every title on this list shares a milieu that helps get you into the story before you even know what you’re reading.

Some of the leg work is pre-loaded as far as a reader/viewers expectations are concerned, and from there, the quality of the writing is left to do the rest. That’s the magic of an aesthetic.

Is this good or bad?

There is undoubtedly a benefit for writers to stick to a niche. If you know what your audience wants, you can spare them the leg work of set-up. Give them something familiar up front, and if what you’re bringing to the table is any good, you can propel that audience to the place they were eventually going to end up in any case. All you’re doing is removing a layer of the up-front resistance that comes with starting any new book, movie or tv show

As a person who has wrestled with the painful process of worldbuilding in my own writing, I envy the simplicity and genius of this approach.

Bear in mind, however, this approach can have the opposite effect as well.
Personally, I’ve got a heavy aversion to the aesthetic of old England, Tudor Stewart Era, suits and frocks etc—which is a bit strange, given that I’m a huge fan of the Russian Classics which overlap this class/living under monarchy aesthetic fairly heavily. The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, Dead Souls etc.

Call it prejudice, call it meatheadedness, but for whatever reason, if I come across this type of period piece, there’s a hurdle to jump before I can get into the story. It requires the writing to be that much better before I will let down these walls.

The same goes for anything space/future oriented (Which is equally as odd to my old england hangup, as I’m pretty heavily invested in the speculative genres within my own writing).

But it’s a real thing, the first sniff of an alien triggers something in my mind that is more than the sum of its parts. Then again, I love the show Black Mirror, which dips into this territory fairly frequently.

Where do these hang-ups come from?

Perhaps part of this is a hangover from the pulp tradition of genre fiction. There’s a certain sector of writers within these genres who rest on the laurels of their predecessors, they leverage their built-in audiences and begin phoning in the quality of their work knowing that their fan bases will likely swallow whatever they’re putting out all the same. Read too many of these duds at a young age and you may be put off the entire bucket of apples.

Perhaps it’s just an association thing. While it may be getting treated to a bit of a makeover in modern times, Sci/fi isn’t historically seen as a “cool” thing to be a fan of. I was the youngest of four brothers, I grew up in rural New Zealand—for me, any kid who was into aliens, comics and space was someone to be avoided.

As an adult these things shouldn’t matter. But they do. It all plays into the framing that you have of the world.

I suppose the lesson here is: If you like to write in a range of genres, don’t expect all of your audience to be on board all of the time. There are some types of stories that certain people will simply hate by virtue of their category, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.

But it makes things hard, doesn’t it?

No one is standing over every page you write, demanding that you align with or diverge from some pre-established aesthetic. Yet, you do have to make a decision all the same because your audience can’t help but be affected by all the above. Making no choice is still a choice.

Much like my example of Black Mirror above, I’m (perhaps foolishly) trying to write in between the lines of genre. My short stories dip in and out of literary and speculative, sometimes philosophical. Which is interesting to me, but hardly gives me a leg up as far as attracting new readers is concerned. There’s no easy package for someone to pick up and say, “oh yes, this will be similar to that other story I like in the same genre, so I’ll give it a try.”

With my novel, this effect is even more highlighted. It’s speculative, it’s set in a fictional society. It’s about power and control, but isn’t necessarily political. The broad genre it falls under is Sci/Fi, but I don’t feel like that label invokes anything that it’s really about.

If I was going to describe the milieu, I’d compare it to an eastern-European, cold war era story—so if you open the first page expecting Star-trek you’re probably going to be disappointed.

The writing’s good² so you shouldn’t be. But I’d be naive to think that’s not a factor.

Who is to blame for this trap?

As I said in the beginning, taste is strange. It’s built around all the broad-stroke categories that we mentally chunk things into.

“If this is advertised as something like X, then I’m in. If it doesn’t deliver, I’m going to be annoyed.”

“If it vaguely sounds like Y story which I didn’t like, then I’m not even going to give it a chance.”

There’s a war of sub-conscious tics that you are up against as a writer, which both lends credibility and culpability to publishers who further emphasize these categories as part of their business model.
Sure they’re capitalizing on tendencies of readers which already exist, but their insistence on reinforcing these genres only exacerbates the issue.

So what can you do with this knowledge?

I guess all you can do is be aware that these tastes are real. You can’t be angry about it. Just know they exist and leverage them where you can, or refuse to if you’re that way inclined. But don’t be shocked when someone gets a leg up that you don’t have.

Creativity is strange.
In the same way that I can’t explain why I’ve developed an inexplicable obsession with the old west as of late, I can’t explain the forces that get a certain story idea stuck in my head.

There are premises that have literally been floating around in my skull for years. Sometimes it takes a bit of time for them to ferment. But that’s the only type of story that I know how to write.

What comes out, comes out.
If that happens to carry an existing framework that people can cling to, great. But it’s not something I’m going to try to manufacture.
I couldn’t start pandering to these genres if I wanted to. What comes out, comes out.

The only god I’m willing to pander to is taste.

My taste.

And as I’ve repeated ad-nauseam by this point. Taste is a strange thing.

1. Correction: Since writing this post, I have come up with a new theory, but I’ll get to that later.

2. If I do say so myself.