Genre Fiction

 My post today is in defense of "genre fiction." It's a follow up to comments by Douglas Skelton. This is the second time I tied my post to his comments. I simply can't help myself. I like what he had to say. 

Right now I'm reading a book on craft that was recommended by one of our own Type M contributors. It's Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses. In the preface he states "Most of the TV we love is very formulaic. Most literary fiction is no different. It meets the expectations of a specific audience." 

We are a reading family. My husband enjoyed reading and heaven knows I easily survived the strictures of the pandemic because I read all of the time. I never have to find time to read any more that I have to find time to breathe. The wonder is that I get anything done at all, let alone write books. 

Our three daughters read and all six grandchildren read. I realize we are very lucky because so often when I speak or give presentations a mother or a grandmother will approach me worried about their kids inability to enjoy books. Society has changed. It seems to me that there are a lot of forces arrayed against books. We are so overwhelmed with printed information that it's no wonder people have been turned off. 

In addition to reading to children, I believe nothing influences children more than the example set by their parents. Instead of always hearing "wait until commercial" they need to hear "wait until I finish this chapter." Grownups can create the impression that reading is one of the most fun activities adults do for pleasure. 

I love reading the award-winning books that walk off with the prestigious prizes. They improve my mind and speak to my soul. In fact, recently I started re-reading some of the books that I read at too young an age. Too young to understand the depths of the themes or the poignancy of the conflicts. 

But in this family of readers, we all have our favorite genres that get us through troubled times. Some of these books are excellent and have become classics in their own right. As contraindicated as it sounds, when I am under a lot of pressure and have too much to do, reading a chapter or two helps me get everything under control. My decompression genre is psychological suspense and mysteries. A little on the dark side.

I tell myself after I read a couple of chapters, I'm going to do xxxxx. Repeat. Repeat. Crazy as it sounds, it gets my enormous to-do list under control. Before long, I can stand to face all of the xxxxx without a sanity break. Then I can put my book aside and tackle my work like a responsible adult.

The daughters' genres are really fascinating. The oldest, Cheryl, is a psychologist. The good doctor has read every Louis L'Amour western ever written. Several times. Much to our amusement, when a professional interior decorator was re-doing her house, she demanded that the classless paperbacks be removed at once. They didn't belong in the same room with her majestic grand piano. Eventually, the designer was vanished and the tattered paperbacks were restored to their rightful place of honor. 

Michele reads childrens' literature when she's maxed out. All the old classics and a bunch of new authors. 

Mary Beth, the youngest, shares my love of mysteries. She has a wee bit of a collector's soul and buys everything Elizabeth George has written.

Ironically, over the years, much of society's most durable literature has come out of "genre fiction." However, when those books reach a certain status, they are then designated as "literary fiction." 

Pidgeonholed!

Vicki’s post from last week, as well as others here on Type M recently, plus some side discussions I’ve had with people, have got me thinking how the crime fiction genre has gotten divided and subdivided and then subdivided again over the past several years, to the point where it’s getting quite, well, silly in many way. Publishers, readers and writers, we’re all guilty in this…crime.

Several years ago, I was describing a novel I was working on to an interested bookseller. “Oh, it’s a chase thriller then.” Huh? “There’s a category for this kind of story?” “Certainly. I have customers who will read nothing else.”

I’ve found out since that there are now very specific categories called things like “woman in peril”, “crafting mysteries”, “food mysteries”. Vicki has started a new series that I guess should be called a “library mystery”. All of this on top of the older categories made up of things like “thrillers”, “hardboiled”, “police procedural”, “amateur sleuth” and “cozy”, to name a few of the main ones.

But now it’s all sliced and diced and readers and publishers are demanding that your novel fall into a neat, little pigeonhole. From a marketing standpoint, I can see why publishers and booksellers might want this. It used to be that you only had to deal with whether you were writing standalones or a series. Bookstore owners usually knew what they were selling so they could tell you about a specific book. Even if you preferred a certain kind of story, you could often be persuaded by someone’s enthusiastic endorsement. If you’re purchasing a book and lack that personal description and recommendation, you might well hesitate to put done as much as forty dollars on a hardcover.

So for various reasons, we’ve become a lot more exclusive these days. It goes far beyond economics and marketing. As I’ve already mentioned in a recent post, many people won’t step outside the little box into which they’ve put themselves. I guess some of it has to do with comfort zones, and for sure, those are important. If a person is not up for a “blood and guts” storyline, it would be a shame to sell them a book that contains this sort of thing.

But these “product placement” boxes may also lead to comments like, “This story is unlike anything we’ve seen. We wouldn’t begin to know how to market it.” Now, unless the writing being commented thusly on is drop-dead, best-ever stuff, the person saying this might well be tempted to take a pass, be they agent, publisher, bookseller or book buyer. I know it happens. One of my novels was stillborn because my description of its plot led to a very similar comment being made by my then-agent. That’s a shame. I still believe it might have been a very interesting story, but I have little enough time to spend on writing to take chances with a dodgy plot line somebody might not be interested in buying into.

Often the best and most groundbreaking writing comes from something experimental or just plain different. These days, for some very good reasons — but also some very bad ones — experimental writing and storylines have a much harder go of it. We’re probably missing some exceptional writing and stories because of it.

Here’s your homework: come with an exact and specific category in which to place your work if you’re a writer. For readers, describe your ideal sort of book. You must be very, very specific so that you can go right to a bookshelf in a store to find it. For my current novel, Roses for a Diva, it would have to be something like “woman in peril, psychopathic chase, musical thriller”.

Sounds enticing doesn’t it? And I’ve also given away a large part of the plot, too!