Current mood:	contemplative
Entry tags:	writing

When They Were Right and You Were Wrong

In his review of Black Static 9, Lawrence Conquest backs up all those critics of Haunt-Type Experience who didn't like the quotes from Parapsychology. Which was, um... almost everyone. Like my CW class, he just doesn't think they add anything to the story.

So do I regret ignoring the advice of a roomful of smart people and keeping the quotes in? Not really. If I'd taken them out I'd always have wondered if I was doing the right thing, because my guts just kept on telling me they had to stay. I still feel like they had to stay.

However, Lawrence describes the quotes as 'pseudo-scientific rationale'. I hate hate hate stories that crowbar weak science into a narrative; it always bounces you right out and makes you go wtf? I'm thinking about midichlorians, and the science bit in the middle of The Time Travellers Wife. The key thing for me in HT-E was that the science was the story. I obviously failed to get that across; I failed to make the SF and horror elements of this story gel.

Is this a personal weakness, or a problem inherent in cross-genre writing? Or both?