Genre Busting

At the Chichester Writing Festival earlier on in the year I had the pleasure of listening to and meeting RJ Ellory. I have posted a published review of the festival here. Roger has written many novels and, like Robert Bruce’s spider, tried, tried and tried again before he was successfully published. Roger that is, not the spider. He just tried. Anyway, I recommend you visit Roger’s website in its entirety as it’s most amusing, but here’s an excerpt:

“…he completed twenty-two novels, most of them in longhand, and accumulated several hundred polite and complimentary rejection letters from many different and varied publishers. The standard response from the UK publishing trade was that they could not consider the possibility of publishing books based in the United States written by an Englishman. He was advised to send his work to American publishers, which he duly did, and received from them equally polite and complimentary rejection letters that said it was not possible for American publishers to publish books set in the US written by an Englishman.”

All very entertaining, but the thing I found most interesting about Roger was his comments on genre. Here’s another excerpt from his website which sums it up rather nicely:

“ On numerous occasions people have tried to identify Roger’s work with a particular genre – crime, thriller, historical fiction – but this categorisation has been a relatively fruitless endeavour. Roger’s ethos is merely to work towards producing a good story, something that encapsulates elements of humanity and life without necessarily slotting into a predetermined pigeonhole.”

Genre has interested me for quite some time, that and the apparent need for humans to categorise and pigeon-hole everything. It’s something Tim Stretton and I discuss in his interview posted here.

Tim’s comments are incisive in that even though us writers are liable to consider ourselves creatives, living in a capitalist world means that success and longevity as an author are ultimately defined by sales. Some might argue the purity of art and cite examples of painters who sold nothing in their lifetime whose works go for millions now, but for me the fact is, our system dictates survival by income and income means profits.

There is a dichotomy here though and one that particularly puzzles me. I have said before that I like ‘quirky’ books and this tends to mean ones that don’t naturally fit in one of the recognised genres that you’ll see in a bookshop i.e. romance, thriller, crime, chick lit, misery memoir etc. Genre to me can often be translated as formulaic and indeed I rattled through Agatha Christie’s oeuvre as a teenager enjoying the familiarity and playing the guessing game as to the identity of the murderer. My English teacher became exasperated and told me to go and read some Daphne Du Maurier. And I love Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, although as the review posted on this site suggests, I am yearning for her to make some significant changes. I recently enjoyed a Martina Cole, and I tried Stephen King not long ago (surely if a writer is so immensely popular we cannot dismiss the work on the grounds of literary snobbery? A discussion for another day, perhaps) but didn’t get on so well. I am reliably informed that I didn’t try the right one. On my list to give another go.

My point is though, when several years ago I was thinking about what I wanted to write, I realised that I didn’t want to write for a particular genre. I wanted to ‘bust’ through the genres, create a new one or twenty somehow. Ambitious or idiotic? Many agents and publishers claim to be looking for original work and voices, but at what point does ‘original’ become too left-field and unpublishable?

I pitch ‘Thirty Seconds Before Midnight’ as a romantic tragedy and although at its core it’s definitely this, I think there’s more to it. The readers love Herbert, the main narrator, but because he is a tortoise some initially assume this is not adult fiction. In our culture we equate animals with children I think and so it’s many readers’ initial assumption that this is a children’s book. Which it quickly turns out, it is not. I think that we humans think we are so superior to, let’s face it, the other animals – and that they do not have the power of conscious thought or real memory. Something I challenge and indeed our perception of the tortoise as wise assists with this. There are, of course, other examples of writers using animals or even inanimate objects as narrators. I very much enjoyed Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s ‘The Book of Chameleons’ where the narrator is a gecko. And my friend and fellow writer AV recommended ‘I Am Cat’ by Soseki Natsume, which I have acquired but not yet read. I have also already recommended Tibor Fischer’s ‘The Collector Collector’ on this site where the narrator is an artifact, an antique bowl, in fact.

It’s difficult because as the writer I am so deeply inside the book that I have written and I’m dying for one of the readers to describe back to me exactly what it is. Initial feedback from my friends is, as to be expected, positive, with no problems enjoying it, the characters, the plot, their desire to know what’s next. This is all good since as an author primarily I seek to entertain, perhaps subtly educate in my more bombastic moments, and to engage the reader in the story is in itself a success. I think the problem is that all of these people know me (even Matron now), which is wonderful but they won’t be able to read the book and disassociate me, and until I receive the opinion and definition on the work from someone I haven’t met, I don’t think I’ll fully understand what it is myself! Sounds a bit melodramatic I know, but resolution to my quandary is forthcoming as LFH has given it to C who I haven’t met and of course, I am awaiting the results from the TLC manuscript read too.

Incidentally, I haven’t read any of Roger’s work to date by the way, so apologies to him if he stumbles across this post, but expect a review in the not so distant future.

On his website he references a book called ‘How Not to Write a Novel’ by David Armstrong. Turns out there are two books with this title and I read the version by Howard Mittlemark and Sandra Newman. In the one I read, I particularly liked the bit about the gun on the mantelpiece.