Not Enough Sleaze in the World?

Scott Seward Smith, a brother aspiring writer, thinks so:

The rejections came in again and, again, appended to one was a hand-written note: "Good writing but characters are sleazy, uninteresting, no real history on either one and no sense of place." This is a rejection? I thought. Except for the "uninteresting" part I would consider it a blurb: sleazy characters slapped from nothing into consciousness, acting out their brief parts on the short-story stage. Of course there was no sense of place: most of the action takes place in a casino -- the most placeless of places. The rejection was actually a perfect summation of my idea of good fiction.

And I realized that most of my short stories were full of sleazy characters -- poets who fail to kill themselves, drunks who cheat on their wives, teachers who sleep with their students, men who learn how to fight because they are cowards, prodigies who are hopelessly cynical by the time they complete college. I don't know why they are so sleazy; I invited them onto the page and that is how they presented themselves and how they kept my attention.

I'm currently enjoying Professor Rufus J. Fears' excellent lecture series on The Great Books for The Teaching Company. I think if Scott listened to these, he'd know why the rejection letters pile up.

Great fiction tells great truths. And the great truth regarding evil is how utterly uninteresting those who practice it are. Spend some time with your typical sleazoid, hanging outside the 7-11 smoking Marlboros and waiting for a "friend". Engage him in conversation, and commit to enduring 15 minutes of the same. I doubt you'll find it interesting.

The Devil's a bore, despite what Milton says, and fiction which sets out once again to show how "interesting" half-men are simply doesn't cut it, at least now that evil isn't rare. Oh, you might be able to pull off a compelling villain, if you're Shakespeare and the villain's Iago. Most of us aren't.

When everybody else is spewing the same old cynical garbage, why not churn out a few "fairy tales"? It's harder than you think, requires tossing away the crutch of the stock "interesting" villains and antiheroes, and likely requires lots of sweat to pull off. Competition's fewer though, and the need is greater.