This is the final installment of the Visionary Fiction as Personal Therapy Series. In part 1, we discussed recognition, when a reader experiences a sense of familiarity while reading. In part 2, visionary fiction authors expressed their feelings of recognition while they were writing their stories. In part 3, various authors discussed how they reacted to issues…
Visionary fiction is a category of fiction that brings a strong vision of the world, points a way forward through tough times. When fiction is billed as visionary it seems to elicit excitement or groans. Bestsellers or flops. And this is usually because it is so easy for visionary fiction to stray into preachiness and…
Art is kind of an innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. Carl Jung, “Psychology and Literature,” Modern Man in Search of a Soul,…
What if I were to tell you that one of the best selling books in history is visionary fiction? Say what? Yep, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, one of the most widely read books in the world, is visionary fiction. And its rise from a flop in 1988 (with sales so dismal that the book was dropped…
“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths….Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.” – Joseph Campbell #Art saved my life #Art healed my heart #Art healed my soul The hashtags are coming in from around the country, flooding social…
Exciting news for all Visionary Fiction authors, readers and lurkers:
As of August 2014 a entry entitled “Visionary fiction” has been published on Wikipedia at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visionary_fiction
This is part 3 of the Visionary Fiction as Personal Therapy Series, which was inspired after I learned about bibliotherapy in my psychology classes. It led me to discover an article by Debbie McCullis in the February, 2014 issue of the Journal of Poetry Therapy. McGullis listed a four step process used in bibliotherapy, which…
Monty Joynes’ achievements are too many and his writings, Visionary Fiction and otherwise, too numerous and varied to cover in the space allotted to a single post. Here I can just hope to put enough, garnished with links leading deeper, to arouse VF authors to curiosity about the life and work of a writer who deserves to be studied and emulated as a stellar model of both the spirit and substance, the art and the craft, of visionary fiction.
Guest Post by Alissa Lukara The Transformational Writers website, like the Visional Fiction Alliance, arose out of my calling to provide a place of support and exploration for writers who aim to explore the evolution of consciousness, alternative realities and write stories that make a positive difference. I wanted to create a haven for visionary…
Today’s post, Revealing the Magical, concludes last week’s post, The Visionary Perspective, in which I attempt to distinguish between the genres of visionary fiction and magical realism—how they differ and where they may overlap. Magical Realism The genre of magical realism blends the supernatural or what is typically unseen by human consciousness with the natural…
I suspect many of you, like me, struggle to define visionary fiction, not to mention how it differs from magical realism. In today’s post, The Visionary Perspective, and next week’s post, Revealing the Magical, I will make an attempt to distinguish between the two genres—how they differ and where they may overlap. An Accurate Place to Land For…
Perhaps those nerdy BISAC categorizers knew more than they let on when they gave VF and MF a joint address in their code. To paraphrase a famous biblical injunction: “What BISAC has joined together let no writer put asunder.” Instead of arguing whether it is VF or MF, perhaps we can settle for V&M, with separate studies and/or bedrooms provided for the persnickety.
Some authors find their focus in their childhood. It’s something they know they’re born to do. Not me. I was a late bloomer—a seed stuck beneath a thick layer of earth. Something kept the water supply from reaching me. For many years, I pondered if there was something wrong with the way my brain functioned. Turns…
Visionary fiction is a relatively new genre in the world of writing and publishing. And the paradox is that it is also an ancient form of storytelling as well. As we engage in discussions about defining Visionary Fiction, we inevitably hit upon the crossover of VF and Spiritual Fiction. While our consensual definition of VF…
It came to mind that a backdoor approach to the key question—What is Visionary Fiction?—might yield valuable insight into this genre’s elusive definition. So let’s take a look, for a lark, at what is not visionary fiction.
Same Umbrella, Different Factions Violence aside, I would gladly welcome the dystopian sci-fi novel Divergent into our “faction” here at Visionary Fiction Alliance. Veronica Roth deserves her New York Times Bestselling Author status. She deserves her book’s 13,561 Amazon reviews (9,733 of which are five stars). She deserves her book sales of over eleven million. All these…
Guest Post by author Leonide Martin Authors of Visionary Fiction encounter a special challenge when their stories take place in historical settings. Each historic period shapes its cultures through a combination of forces, from evolution to technology and climate. Within cultures, the unique chronicle of events, resources, worldview, and spirituality become defining forces. When cultures…
IN THE EARLIER SEGMENTS OF THIS SERIES we imparted good news (the up-and-coming BISAC system provides a high-level unique code for Visionary & Metaphysical Fiction) and bad news (authors and vendors don’t use the code often enough to make VF books easily accessible to readers). In this section I’ll follow up on the complexities of proper categorization and make some suggestions that will not handicap the individual VF author in the short run but build a robust VF collection in the near future.
(The second of a four-part series that explores a hidden root of the problem in popularizing Visionary Fiction as a genre and proposes a nifty ready-made solution to it.) Click link to read Part 1: The Fiction Prejudice Click link to read Part 2: The BISAC Solution BEFORE GETTING TOO COZY in the permanent home (Main…
(The second of a three-part series that explores a hidden root of the problem in popularizing Visionary Fiction as a genre and proposes a nifty ready-made solution to it.) Click link to read Part 1: The Fiction Prejudice Marketing Categories Since libraries aim to retain books and bookstores to sell them, no wonder a category system…
A Movie Experience of Visionary Fiction We are well aware that Visionary Fiction, with regards to the publishing industry, is a genre in its infancy, though its form and mode of storytelling is perennial. One way to describe, define, and increase awareness of this genre for authors, readers, agents, and publishers, is to show by…
(The first of a three-part series that explores a hidden root of the problem in popularizing Visionary Fiction as a genre and proposes a nifty ready-made solution to it.) All Fiction to the Back of the Bus If you’ve felt that writing fiction is sometimes perceived as second-class to writing non-fiction, know that the apparent prejudice…
When it comes to promoting visionary fiction, I sometimes feel like Don Quixote, cherishing magical hopes and taking on missions I’m not equipped to handle. I begin to wonder if I’m no more than a delusional dreamer, fighting windmills and sheep. Then, as so often happens in life, along comes a reminder that being idealistic…
To read or review “Carl Jung and Visionary Fiction, Part 1, click HERE. “Universal in Worldview and Scope” The VFA characterizes Visionary Fiction as “universal in worldview and scope.” The Jungian visionary novel “is not concerned with the individual even when it is written about an individual,” Keyes says. “Exploring the individual experience is a…
Psychological Fiction versus Visionary Fiction It may come as a shock, or at least a revelation, to Visionary Fiction readers and writers that Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology, defined Visionary Fiction and described it in detail in a lecture delivered in 1929, “Psychology and Literature,” included in the…
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what about ugliness? How do we define ugly? What repulses us? And why? In his latest novel, INNOCENCE, Dean Koontz shows us ugly. Little by little, step by step, he immerses us in ugly; until we are in ugly’s head. And then he holds up a…