Tag: genre

Trans-Genre’d

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This reminds me of hot summer afternoons, lying on suburban lawns and watching the clouds drift by. These are from sunrise this morning, though, thus the pink, and I was never up that early in my teenage summers.

Things change.

Irene Goodman, described as a “leading literary agent in New York who has has many New York Times bestsellers,” which means she’s one of the hottest agents out there, authored an article for the September Romance Writers Report. (RWA’s industry magazine.) She titled it “Common Mistakes by New Authors” and lists five mistakes. Of those, three are related to genre:

1. They don’t pick a genre and stick to it.
2. They choose uncommercial subjects.
3. They choose genres that are out of style.

(The other two are about plot and conflict/tension.)

This article immediately annoyed me. I can see her points, sure, but I think the article could be better titled “How to approach your writing like a product.” To me, this is something for the agents to think about, not the writers.

I could be wrong, but hear me out.

Genre is a marketing thing. It’s a false line drawn to give bookstores and libraries a way to shelve books. It’s intended to give readers a way to find the kind of book they love best. Music and movies are divided up the same way. And we have all had that experience, as readers or listeners, of vainly searching the shelves for a particular author or movie, only to resort to the teenage cashier with a slow computer.

“I think this movie is drama, but clearly you guys don’t.”

“Oh! That’s in comedy, actually.”

I have had this conversation any number of times. I’m sure you have, too. And who knows? Maybe the writer and director absolutely believed they’d made a comedy and I’m the odd one focusing on the drama. Or, maybe they made a drama and the marketers said, look! right there, someone laughed! and stamped the nicely selling “Comedy” label on it.

I’m seeing a lot of this from agents lately, that we as authors should know what genre our book is. They consider it fundamental. Irene says that we should pick a nice, fashionable and commercial genre and write exactly that book. This completely ignores the fact that most writers aren’t writing genres, we’re writing stories. Once we’re done, and we’re writing up our queries, we tilt our heads at it and say, “well, it’s got an urban fantasy premise in a non-urban landscape with high fantasy elements and also contemporary romance… I’ll call it dark fantasy.”

Yeah -all you agents out there (I fantasize that you read my blog – I have a rich imagination) are clutching your heads in despair. We’re sorry. We really are. But you knew we were doing this, right?

Fact is, I have two writer friends with books coming out soon, who were coached to revise their books towards one genre or another, after they had the publishing contract. I suspect this happens a lot. And really, both were fine with it. Shape it in this direction? I can do that. Plan it that way to begin with? That means you’re planning a product, not spinning a story. To me, as a writer, the two come from very different places in myself.

I’ve been president of the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal chapter of RWA for almost two years now and a frequent topic of debate is which genre to sandwich a story into. We’re obviously a polyglot of a chapter, with writers of Science Fiction Romance, shape-shifters, time-travel, vampires, swords & sorcery, ghosts, everyday magic. Really, if someone writes anything kind of weird, they end up with us.

I absolutely understand that this is something that publishers, editors and agents have to think about. That’s their business. I suspect it’s an interesting aspect of the business for them. I would think they’d have to get really good at it, to succeed.

However, I think it’s a mistake to exhort writers to get on board that wagon.

And let me say, right here and now, that I do believe the agent/author relationship is a partnership. You have to work together for mutual success. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s very difficult for me to look at my story, which is this great swirling mass in my head of faces and feelings and conflicts and desires, and slap a label on it. If someone else looks at it and says, well, with a few tweaks, it would fit nicely here, I would be grateful.

To me, that’s part of what an agent brings to the relationship. You wrote it, now I’ll help you sell it.

Finally, the other day I watched Oprah’s interview of JK Rowling on You Tube. (It’s well worth watching and broken out into segments so you don’t have to commit to the whole thing at once.) At one point, Rowling talks about signing the publishing contract for the first Harry Potter and how her agent said, congratulations, but you’ll never make any money writing children’s books.

Of course, Rowling is now the only billionaire writer in the world.

I totally don’t hold this against her agent. Harry Potter could be slotted as a children’s book and they didn’t make money at that time. They were uncommercial and unfashionable. But if you walk into a store today, to buy a Harry Potter book – do you head for the children’s section?

Yes, I know Harry Potter was an unpredictable phenomenon. Like Twilight, like a bunch of others we could name. They broke new ground, because they were new stories. Genres lines are bent to accommodate them.

Things change.

I wonder, if those new writers had followed Ms. Goodman’s advice, would they have written those books? Of course, 99% of us will never become phenomena like them, so maybe it’s good advice for the working writer. And yet, I think most of us write, not to churn out a product, but because we become obsessed with a story.

Of course, we’d love to sell it, too. Have patience with us. Help us out here.

Maybe it’s really a High Paranormal Fantasy?

Forever Stuck on the Road Less Traveled

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I may have made a mistake.

I know, I know — we can crack all the jokes we like about writing it on the calendar, etc. But I’m begining to think I really miscalculated, becoming involved in this whole genre thing.

When I first began writing, and I really trace this back to grad school, since I don’t believe childhood stories and adolescent angsty poetry really count, my work came out as essays. To get some relief from what had become the crushing pressure of my PhD in Neurophysiology program, I began taking classes with the visiting writers program.

And, oh, the excitement of those days.

I loved meeting the visiting writers, and the other students. I loved the workshops, the stimulation of it all. And they supported me in very useful ways. I learned to explore my new art. An artist’s retreat accepted me to stay for two weeks, I received fellowships and other awards.

And I was rewarded early on with publishing success.

I wouldn’t say the magazines fell over themselves to publish me, but it was fairly steady, from Redbook to Literary Mags, I published in several a year until, eight years after my first class, I held my essay collection, published by a university press, in my hands.

Then I stalled.

There were a lot of reasons. Mainly I couldn’t quite get the two nonfiction projects I was working on to gel. So I wrote a novel, Obsidian, about sex and magic. I thought, oh, I’ll sell this and the genre work will bring in the money so I can focus on the nonfiction projects.

Yeah, it didn’t work out that way. Even though one of the editors at a sci fi magazine I’d published with said that an agent would snap up a writer like me, no one has. One agent early on wrote me a letter saying how disappointed he was, because he’d loved my idea but then I’d gone and written it like some kind of literary book.

A few months later, I went to the RWA National conference, where my name tag identified me as unpublished. Because Romance Writers of America considers you published only if it’s in the genre. A month before, I’d been a featured writer on a panel at a book festival. At one lunch, I sat next to a woman I didn’t know. In fact, I did at every meal since I knew no one. I don’t remember her name — she was another unpubbed wannabe like me. At the end of the meal, she said she looked forward to reading my book. Foolishly, I pulled my essay collection out of my bag, saying I had some with me. She looked at me like I’d offered her dog shit and said, no, she meant my romance novel, whenever I got it published.

I sent my first query on Obsidian 12/20/07. Just over two years ago, for those keeping score at home. Admittedly, it wasn’t really ready for prime time then. Hindsight is 20/20. Meanwhile, a gal I know wrote a book while snowed in during December 2008, that she just sold in a three-book deal.

Jayne Ann Krentz wrote an interesting post on the FFP blog recently. She speaks frankly about writing as a business, which she’s clearly better at than I am. She says this:

DON’T GET TOO FAR AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Trust me on this. I’ve been there and done that and it rarely goes well. Back at the beginning of my career I tried to do a futuristic/paranormal. That very first manuscript had all of the elements that I now work with freely: romance, suspense and a psychic twist. I can’t tell you how many rejection slips the manuscript garnered. They all had the same theme: “Really enjoyed the writing but unfortunately there’s no market for this kind of romance.”

She could be talking about me. For some reason, no matter what I’m doing, I never quite fit neatly into what everyone else is doing. I didn’t in high school, I didn’t in my PhD program. I don’t now.

I really don’t think I’m doing it on purpose.

At any rate, I’m back where I was three years ago when I started writing Obsidian. Unable to sell my current project, I think I’m going back to nonfiction. I actually know where to take one of the two I was working on then.

I have learned one thing, that querying and selling have to be background activities. You can make yourself crazy if they’re your main focus.

It might be precious to say, but it forever and always must be mainly about the writing.