So Bad It’s Good: How To Write Terribly Incredible (Or Incredibly Terrible) Campy Fiction
Like all good aesthetics, camp is a lot more sophisticated than
it looks and writing it well can be challenging. It’s not enough to dress your
hero in spandex and have your villain cackling madly while the heroine runs
around screaming for rescue in a fruit-topped hat. That’s just cliché, while
good camp is a celebration of the exaggerated and excessive.
Be Focused
It’s not enough to say “I want this to be camp.” If you throw
in every campy trope you can find then you’ll have a mess, with one excess
undermining another. A campy science fiction story interrupted by an excessive
moment of dark literary fiction will lose atmosphere faster than a
colander-based spaceship.
Think about what you’re exploring, what you want to make camp,
and push that thing to excess. Do you want to write a high fantasy of sweaty
muscles, kidnapped slave girls and kingdoms defined by single concepts? Or are
you after a delightful horror of shadowy streets, blood-spattered sheets, and
dead jocks?
Whatever you’re camping up, identify its individual excesses
and focus on those.
Be Full-on
There are no half-measures in camp. If you approach the brink
of absurdity only to hesitate and step back, then all you have is corniness and
cliché. The pleasure of camp comes from its excess, so really push the boat
out.
Reasonableness is the enemy of camp. It isn’t reasonable for
your action hero to drive a monster truck, carry a bazooka on her back, and
chug beer like she has the liver capacity of the whole U.S. Congress. But if
she just drives a 4x4, carries a handgun, and finishes the day with a few too
many whiskies then what you have isn’t camp, it’s the hero of 90% of the
adventure stories out there. So go with Bazooka Betty, not Hetty Handgun.
Be Sincere
All of this might sound like a rallying cry to mock the genre
you’re working in. But again, that really misses the point. Camp isn’t about
standing outside the tent pissing in, it’s about running around the inside of
the tent celebrating just how much fun canvas is.
The edge of mockery, the knowing wink that implies “we’re
better than this,” that’s the realm of satire. It has its place and it has its
audience, but that audience isn’t the same one camp appeals to. Satire is about
being negative, camp is about being positive. Satire is judgemental, camp is
celebratory. Satire is about pointing out the foolishness of others, while camp
is about knowing that what you’re doing is foolish but enjoying it anyway. You
don’t point at the excess, you join in with it.
So if you want to do campy writing, make sure the subject and
style are something that you love. Make sure that you can write that wild
excess like you mean it. If you can make that happen then fans will love you
for it. But if you step into satire, if you slip in a little mockery for fear
of being mocked, then the joy will fade.
If you’re going to write campy then relish
it. Focus on something that you sincerely love, and write it right to the
extreme. Because anything less is just cliché, and the world has quite enough
of that.
A.G. Wyatt is the author of the post-apocalyptic adventure series, MoonFall and is presently working on his second series. When he's not writing, he's reading, or looking for inspiration near his hometown in Northeastern PA.
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