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Does your story have genre clichéitis?
Jul. 8th, 2009 01:01 amYes, I know I am meant to be writing or sleeping, but I had a little epiphany today about writing and reading and I wanted to share it, and it was either post here or continue working on the Giant Georgia-inspired Writing Post of Doom. (Which is currently at 6000 words with notes for another 15,000 at least, and I cannot open it or I will never finish my story.) So please bear with me.
My epiphany manifested swiftly, but had its birth over the last few days. To start with,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pushdragon and I were talking about Pericles, and she wondered if the choice to play the final act largely seriously after the often riotous comedy that had gone before may not have been a poor one. I confessed that I had not noticed, because I am too used to renaissance and mediaeval theatre, where that sort of thing happens all the time. (NB, this is why you should always ask Push, not me, about a play. Throw in a good concluding dance or a bit of Festival and I think it's a winner even if it's actually a bit dodgy.)
Yesterday, my young friendtomatoe18 bemoaned that she just could not get into The Demon's Lexicon. This surprised me, because she is a really good reader, and it is a good book. But I thought about my reading of it and remembered that I had found the lead character astonishingly hard to connect with, to the point I quickly realised that it must *spoiler* be a plot twist (which it is, and a nicely constructed one). I thought about Amy and what she likes to read, and realised that she would be reading the whole book with her emotional brain on, which is the way that most Young Adult Fiction, homoerotic fiction and high-end fantasy novels are written these days. I suggested that she approach it like a mystery instead, which is how I ended up reading it, and she found she was able to finish it last night.
Hmmmm, I said to myself, nodding with annoying smugness, our pre-established audience responses can really send us in unhelpful directions, can't they? My own distaste for trashy horror nearly saw me snub the Sookie Stackhouse books, which I enjoyed ENORMOUSLY. And I was a good 100 pages in before I realised that they were in fact filled with genre jokes and political satire, because I had assumed they were Serious Fantasy/Horror Business.
I thought that was the extent of things, until I staggered half-deranged and mildly rain-splattered onto the train from North Sydney earlier this evening. I sat beside a man who looked just like an average opera singer I used to fancy and, in a bid to not peer at his face, I pulled out last week's New Yorker and tried to finish the excellent story on Nora Roberts.
I should confess at this point that before reading this article, I had only the vaguest idea who Nora Roberts was, which should cement any ideas you may have about my level of wankery and demolish any reputation for keen insights into the world of publishing I may have constructed. For those of you who are similarly ignorant, she is a massively famous and successful American romance writer.
The magazine article on her is long, comprehensive and fascinating. And on the second-last page, it contains this sentence:
'In a 1981 survey, the literature professor Janice A. Radway, found that the romance readers in her sample group considered the depiction or rape only slightly less objectionable than a sad ending.'
I put the magazine down. I looked at the man beside me to discover that he was almost certainly not David Hobson. I mentally listened to the Hallelujah Chorus and enjoyed the short firework display that my brain had scheduled to underscore the fact that it had reached a probably obvious but to me revelatory conclusion.
Those fanfic writers who look at me blankly when I say 'I just do not feel that people respond to sexual violence by immediately falling in love with their violator' were probably raised on old-school romance. More, those fantasy writers who I cannot convince to give their characters sane names have grown up with characters called Willow, Aragorn and Locke and do not know that the Middle Ages were full of Johns, Williams, Janes and Elizabeths (and Tiffanys, strange but true). Similarly, those action-based story aficionados who think it is perfectly logical to have highly trained military or spy-type folk rush off with a strategy that is full of logical holes have almost certainly formed their ways of thinking about campaigns during the Bush administration (is it too soon?).
In every case, the resultant story will be readily understood by a component of its audience, but can alienate or baffle the rest. Because it is written from a basis of genre conventions rather than being written as an organic story within itself. Similarly, as readers, we can cock up our relationship with a new book because we approach it from the basis of its genre, rather than reading it as a thing within itself, feeling our own way through its people and events.
When this occurred to me, I thought, oh but surely that's obvious and you've just forgotten you know it. But on longer reflection, it's not. Like may of us, I've been bamboozled by publishers into reading their books according to their rules, and those rules are rules of marketing, not of writing. I like to think that I make fewer of these errors as a writer, but if that is true, then it is only because my reading is so broad. Or perhaps because being bound by the conventions of political satire is not so limiting as working within some other genres ...
On an unrelated note, Lance Armstrong, you are a freak, well done. And Fabian Cancellara, congratulations. Australian commentators, please note, it is Tours de France, not Tour de Frances. I know that you are not taught this at school, but feel certain someone around you has probably corrected you at some point, you should listen to them. (Also Grands Prix, but that's a different commentary team.)
And I have the most awful crush on Kevin McCloud.
My epiphany manifested swiftly, but had its birth over the last few days. To start with,
pushdragon and I were talking about Pericles, and she wondered if the choice to play the final act largely seriously after the often riotous comedy that had gone before may not have been a poor one. I confessed that I had not noticed, because I am too used to renaissance and mediaeval theatre, where that sort of thing happens all the time. (NB, this is why you should always ask Push, not me, about a play. Throw in a good concluding dance or a bit of Festival and I think it's a winner even if it's actually a bit dodgy.)Yesterday, my young friend
tomatoe18 bemoaned that she just could not get into The Demon's Lexicon. This surprised me, because she is a really good reader, and it is a good book. But I thought about my reading of it and remembered that I had found the lead character astonishingly hard to connect with, to the point I quickly realised that it must *spoiler* be a plot twist (which it is, and a nicely constructed one). I thought about Amy and what she likes to read, and realised that she would be reading the whole book with her emotional brain on, which is the way that most Young Adult Fiction, homoerotic fiction and high-end fantasy novels are written these days. I suggested that she approach it like a mystery instead, which is how I ended up reading it, and she found she was able to finish it last night. Hmmmm, I said to myself, nodding with annoying smugness, our pre-established audience responses can really send us in unhelpful directions, can't they? My own distaste for trashy horror nearly saw me snub the Sookie Stackhouse books, which I enjoyed ENORMOUSLY. And I was a good 100 pages in before I realised that they were in fact filled with genre jokes and political satire, because I had assumed they were Serious Fantasy/Horror Business.
I thought that was the extent of things, until I staggered half-deranged and mildly rain-splattered onto the train from North Sydney earlier this evening. I sat beside a man who looked just like an average opera singer I used to fancy and, in a bid to not peer at his face, I pulled out last week's New Yorker and tried to finish the excellent story on Nora Roberts.
I should confess at this point that before reading this article, I had only the vaguest idea who Nora Roberts was, which should cement any ideas you may have about my level of wankery and demolish any reputation for keen insights into the world of publishing I may have constructed. For those of you who are similarly ignorant, she is a massively famous and successful American romance writer.
The magazine article on her is long, comprehensive and fascinating. And on the second-last page, it contains this sentence:
'In a 1981 survey, the literature professor Janice A. Radway, found that the romance readers in her sample group considered the depiction or rape only slightly less objectionable than a sad ending.'
I put the magazine down. I looked at the man beside me to discover that he was almost certainly not David Hobson. I mentally listened to the Hallelujah Chorus and enjoyed the short firework display that my brain had scheduled to underscore the fact that it had reached a probably obvious but to me revelatory conclusion.
Those fanfic writers who look at me blankly when I say 'I just do not feel that people respond to sexual violence by immediately falling in love with their violator' were probably raised on old-school romance. More, those fantasy writers who I cannot convince to give their characters sane names have grown up with characters called Willow, Aragorn and Locke and do not know that the Middle Ages were full of Johns, Williams, Janes and Elizabeths (and Tiffanys, strange but true). Similarly, those action-based story aficionados who think it is perfectly logical to have highly trained military or spy-type folk rush off with a strategy that is full of logical holes have almost certainly formed their ways of thinking about campaigns during the Bush administration (is it too soon?).
In every case, the resultant story will be readily understood by a component of its audience, but can alienate or baffle the rest. Because it is written from a basis of genre conventions rather than being written as an organic story within itself. Similarly, as readers, we can cock up our relationship with a new book because we approach it from the basis of its genre, rather than reading it as a thing within itself, feeling our own way through its people and events.
When this occurred to me, I thought, oh but surely that's obvious and you've just forgotten you know it. But on longer reflection, it's not. Like may of us, I've been bamboozled by publishers into reading their books according to their rules, and those rules are rules of marketing, not of writing. I like to think that I make fewer of these errors as a writer, but if that is true, then it is only because my reading is so broad. Or perhaps because being bound by the conventions of political satire is not so limiting as working within some other genres ...
On an unrelated note, Lance Armstrong, you are a freak, well done. And Fabian Cancellara, congratulations. Australian commentators, please note, it is Tours de France, not Tour de Frances. I know that you are not taught this at school, but feel certain someone around you has probably corrected you at some point, you should listen to them. (Also Grands Prix, but that's a different commentary team.)
And I have the most awful crush on Kevin McCloud.
