As an Instructor at UCLA Extension Writing Program, I answer her questions about Experimental Writing, Lucid Fiction, and my class on Experimental Fiction Writing online.

Sara is Creative Writing (Online) and Events Program Assistant at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program www.uclaextension.edu/writers and she is asking questions of Tantra as she prepares to unveil her online Experimental Fiction Writing Class.

SB: So, I’m sure many students are wondering: what is experimental fiction? What are some of the differences between mainstream writing and this genre?

TB: Experimental Fiction is Literary, with a goal towards an artistic presentation of the subject in a unique way. And in any innovative literature, especially the more experimental it is, a big part of the “subject” actually IS the presentation. The WAY it is conveyed can be exciting, and the structure itself, for example, can imply something about the nature of reality, communication, the self, so many things. . . .

To read something like that can make you feel you are in on a secret, have a special understanding of the writer’s intellectual constructs he is enamored of releasing to the world, as you grasp what he’s doing with the use of voice, perspective, format of words on the page, or whatever he choses to do that breaks out of the routine.

Sometimes, mainstream writing may leave you with a similarly enthused feeling but based on the plot. For example, you may feel, “yes, I know who killed that man, and I have put the reasons for it together, and it’s that secret society business, with those clues adding up. Life really was like that, I know it, and I’m learning more about it as I go! This author and I think alike!”

Experimental Fiction may create that fascination with the plot, of course, and reading it can therefore combine that feeling of excitement with both plot AND the form which portrays an intellectual construct. Double your pleasure!

Mainstream writing is more straightforward storytelling, using good writing rules such as Show Don’t Tell, believable characters you care about, tension, a hook that draws in the reader. Those kinds of rules are very commonly taught in writing classes, and are very useful. The way it is told does matter in that kind of way. But those things can be just taken for granted by the reader, who doesn’t notice them, other than maybe to appreciate the power of certain images, or noticing how caught up he may be in the suspense.

When the reader is noticing how the writer put the story together in a way that rebelliously breaks some rules for a purpose, whimsically plays around with writing conventions, or stomps on tradition with combat boots, he is reading Experimental Fiction.

This is an excerpt.