Back in 1762, a book made a big stir. Someone wrote that they'd seen people reading the book and crying with emotion. Goethe said it 'had a universal influence on the cultivated mind.' It changed the way people looked at the world. Some people didn't approve: the book was banned and burned in public by outraged authorities in Paris and Geneva.

You've probably never heard of the book, or read it. It started a genre called the Bildungsroman which was wildly popular at one time. I'm willing to bet you have never read a Bildungsroman unless you speak French or German and were forced to do this in school. So it goes.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had something to say, and he said it. It happened to be the right time to say it, and other people listened. Before he wrote his book, talking about education and the way it shapes character was not a Thing. Then it became a Thing. People benefited.

Back in the 1950s, only certain types of people read science fiction. Most of them were educated, but not necessarily literary people. They didn't read the stories to fall in love with the characters (the character development was nearly nil), or to memorise trivia about the spaceships, planets, or aliens in the stories. They read the stories for the speculative ideas about reality.

About the same time, there were people who read comic books. These people were generally male, and either kids, or adults with a peculiar hobby. Nobody thought they were harmful, exactly, but nobody would give them brownie points for an encyclopedic knowledge of caped crusaders.

There were also people who liked fantasy. Surprisingly, most of them were either 12-year-old girls who'd just discovered Madeleine L'Engle, or bored Christian college students who were busy passing around CS Lewis and Tolkien.

If you take a look at this week's cinema offerings, or peruse your Netflix menu, you'll notice that these three genres have pretty much taken over the mainstream. Like the Bildungsroman, they are here to stay until the next wave of passionate interest comes along. And like a large percentage of Bildungsromane, most of what's out there is probably junk, and certainly not as enlightening as the original stuff.

None of this is a rant about 'the past was better'. The past was not ipso facto better. Neither is the present, or the future, zarquon help us. The trick, dear reader, is to remember that you have a time machine and can pick what you like – and leave the rest.

Now, what do Emile and Star Trek teach us? That there will always be an imaginative status quo. At any given time, everybody will be reading, acting out, watching, and collecting the collectibles from some genre or other that hits the spot for them. Until it stagnates. Until the practitioners get so crass about what they're doing that it's all just rote memorisation. Until nobody's learning anything from it anymore. Until critics are reduced to saying, 'Ms X really portrayed the self-sacrificing alien very effectively. Kudos to the makeup team.' Until people are bored to death with it all.

What you do with this information is up to you. You can write the Definitive Zombie Movie and go down in history as the last bright spot in the genre. Don't like writing zombie scripts? Don't give up. You might just be onto something. Maybe you're working on the next Emile. Maybe somewhere, somebody will be sitting under a tree crying because what you wrote spoke to them so completely.

Either way, don't worry. Zombie movies will come back around again. So will the Bildungsroman. Let's face it: last week, I chuckled over 'Enoch Soames'. But there's very little difference between Spasmodic poetry and punk rock lyrics.

But, like a streamer strown upon the wind,

We fling our souls to fate and to the future.

For to die young is youth’s divinest gift.

Philip James Bailey, Festus

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

06.01.20 Front Page

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