Does your story have genre clichéitis?

[blamebrampton]

Yes, 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, 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.

Comments

[empress-jae.livejournal.com]

that's weird...i just saw a production of Pericles this past sunday. considering that i'd never read the play nor seen a production of it before now, it's interesting that you mention it in a post.

nevermind me...*goes back to watching MJ memorial*

[faynia.livejournal.com]

Rambling posts by you make my afternoon a happy, happy place. I wish I had something clever and interesting to add to this post, but I really just don't. >.> Oh well!

[absynthedrinker.livejournal.com]

I always feel so much smarter and better prepared to live in the world after reading one of your posts. Thanks

[bryoneybrynn.livejournal.com]

Excellent points all of them. It's true that the way a story is packaged and presented often influences our understanding of it even before we open the cover. And more than once I've read a story or scene a movie that was playing with conventions and it took me a while to catch on to what was happening and then read it at that new level. I tend to absorb things at surface-level. I seem to save my sophisticated thinking for school/psych, and take my entertainment at face-value. I have to remind myself to look beyond the story - it isn't my first instinct at all (have I ever mentioned that I often feel I am THE flakiest PhD out there?).

But it is also true that sometimes, I'm just looking for a good old true-to-genre story that doesn't play any games. And sometimes I am annoyed when people take my favourite stories and analyse them at higher levels that ruin their inherent awesomeness (speak to me not of the Ender = Hitler people). Oh, bb, were that I was a sophisticated consumer of the literature but I fear I am not...

And Lance is a crazy monster. My pet peeve? Commentators that call it Toor DES Frants with the frakking emphasis on the des that isn't even a des!!! *grumbles*

[lotus-lizzy.livejournal.com]

It's the old saying, you can't judge a book by its cover. You also can't, it seems, judge it by its genre.

[wailing-owl.livejournal.com]

Brilliant, thinky post. I wish I had some kind of intelligent comment to make about it, but this is something I'm going to have to mull over - both as a reader and a writer - for quite a while, I think. Thank you.

[being-here.livejournal.com]

I know it's not your main point, but I loved the Sookie Stackhouse series the first time I read them. Coming back to them last month though the language grated on me, and they struck me as really badly written - the latter books especially. But then I have a tendency to see series as being too pointlessly convoluted sometimes. I think you can see when a publisher loses editorial 'control' over a popular writer.

[mific.livejournal.com]

Yeah, interesting. I think it's one reason I've always loved and read science fiction, which is a bit less constrained by genre conventions. No, that's not really the case on second thought, but there are a lot of different sub-genres I guess within that field, so more range or less predictability.
I used to do a difficult job involving intense interpersonal r/ships, and at that stage I relaxed with "good" murder mysteries - presumably as an escape from the emotional intensity of work (or as I wanted to kill someone).
These days I'm in a less tense job but a more isolated one with less people-contact, and what do you know, I've discovered fanfiction focussing on fantasy, relationships and angst. I don't think it's a coincidence. I liked the Demon's Lexicon in the end, but struggled with the emotional aridity of the central character most of the way, too.
What with the fanfiction obsession, playing on sites like this and the companion animal (as in icon) I sometimes think I'm the poster-girl for virtual social connectedness trumping real day-to-day relationships. The way the sociologists worry we're all heading. Perhaps there's a link to the general rise of the romantic fantasy genre there.
But, hey, enough navel-gazing, I need to go write stories about Sirius and Remus and read more about SGA's John and Rodney. And lets not even get INTO the slash thing (penis envy? what penis envy)...

[drgaellon]

Nora Roberts is also quite a good writer of mystery/thrillers, under the nom de plume of J.D. Robb. All her Robb books (the titles are all of the format "Something in Death") are about a near-future (50-odd years) homicide detective in the New York Police Department, her partner, friends and lover, investigating murders in NYC.

[potteresque_ire]

I think I love you :DDDDD

I wish I know what were the genre conventions in the first place - there're nice points about being illiterate I suppose. *nods*

I totally judge a book by the cover! That's the only way I know to guess the book's target readers. Library books obviously present a problem because the cover is protected :D.

Usually, I avoid portrait type covers ... oil pointing style especially; the bigger the head, the less likely I'd pick it up; I prefer head diameter less than one-third of book cover's width. Also, too much grass and horses; and what else, mmmm, men or boys in suspenders and straw hats...and curly title fonts. Books with titles written in any font with radius of curvature greater than the font size at non loopy places; add extra negative points if shiny and in magenta...

*giggles and runs away*

PS. But oh oh oh, I've actually read Nora Roberts before!

[romaine24.livejournal.com]

Here's a link for an article on "today's romance novels" :)

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2009-07-06-romance-novels_N.htm

I think you have nailed why some fanfic stories are big hits and then why some folks don't understand why they are big hits (leaving grammar issues aside). I like mystery, adventure, science fiction, and/or politics so its harder for me to appreciate a character analysis story or one built upon romance. I admit there are a few I adore but my hp fanfic favorites list is mainly composed of long plotty stories.

I unfortunately left my copy of the Demon's Lexicon at the windshield replacement shop last week. :( I don't have the time to go pick it up before my vacation. I told the office assistant to enjoy it.

[aldehyde.livejournal.com]

what an interesting post :D i wish you'd told me to approach TDL as a mystery too; perhaps i wouldn't have disliked it so much.

[tomatoe18.livejournal.com]

I've always known publishers were evil, and yet here I am selling their books as a living... :P

Anyway, I've thought about my feelings on TDL once again and... I wondered if I'd subconsciously been influenced by the author's reputation as a 'wonderful fanfic writer loved by the fandom'. Earlier I'd claimed that I wasn't, but perhaps I'd been after all. *shrugs*

You're right, though. I should try to read each book, as you say, as a thing within itself, feeling my own way through its people and events. The next time I pick up a hyped-up book within a certain genre, I will certainly remember this.

[noeon.livejournal.com]

Genre is such a tricky thing to get right. Conform to it too closely and the writing will sound formulaic. Take too many risks and your public will ask for roadmaps (if you're lucky).

A Demon's Lexicon was a bit of mystery. That is an interesting point. But it had a fairly angsty, "sunken" protagonist view as well, so the cues to read it emotionally were there. I was sincerely disappointed by it, plot-wise, though I found characters compelling and will read the next one, so I suppose it's done its work.

*grins over the cover art litmus test and Tour de Frances* Poor Frances. I wonder if she sang them any of her little songs or served them bread and jam.

[grey-hunter.livejournal.com]

Ooh, you got me thinking. Now my brain cogs won't stop turning until I can think of at least one thing I always commit (unintentionally) in my fics.

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

I've been lurking for a bit, because I like your fic. May I add you to my friendslist?

And this post crystallises many of the problems I've had trying to read much current YA and fantasy fiction. I'm not a sink-into-the-story-and-wallow reader. ALl I want is characters who make sense within their environment, and sadly a lot of the time they don't. Now I have a hypothesis why. Thank you.