Recently I signed myself up to have an author chat at Circlet Press’s LiveJournal community. I run the Circlet LJ chats, so I can do that. It’s harder than you might think to get the silent viewers to chat back, so I posted that people who asked me questions would be entered into a book raffle. This got me a lot more informed, thoughtful participation than I expected.
I’ve noticed before that I never really enjoy discussions about genre. Some people think that genre is interesting to discuss. I’ve never really figured out why. It feels like something people talk about if they don’t have anything else to say.
The two questions about genre did not feel informed or thoughtful. They were irritating.
One person asked me I started out writing cross-genre work, of if I started at one “end” or the other. Another asked me how I approached the erotica writing genre (I answered “with a spear and a net.”).
Why are these questions so annoying? Fundamentally I don’t write in any genre, “cross” or otherwise. I write things that I enjoy, and they acquire genre based on who buys the manuscript and how the publisher markets it. If I think about genre, it’s mostly to be annoyed that I can’t call it “high fantasy,” though I don’t mind the “romance” label because it allows me to find readers.
Do other people feel that way about genre? Do you think about the subject when you’re writing? Do you care where other people categorize your writing?
Kneel to Me
Mate: And More Stories from the Erotic Edge of SF/Fantasy
Up for Grabs
Wired Hard 4
Wishbone
I’m trying to figure out exactly how I should answer this, since I’m one of those annoying people who asked about genres.
I don’t, actually, really enjoy talking specifically about genres. I certainly don’t enjoy at *all* debating which books should be categorized how, that’s just tedium to the extreme.
I do, however, often find myself asking many people what genres they write, or more specifically how they see the progression of genres that they’ve written for in the past. And the thing is that I’ll keep asking the question to writers with whose works I’m not yet particularly familiar, even when I don’t want to know the answer.
What I want is the *story*. Most people that I read who write stories classified as cross-genre erotica/just-about-anything-else either started out writing smut, or they started out writing things they intended for Asimov’s. It’s extremely rare for me to hear that they’ve always written that type of story. And when they started at one end of the spectrum, if you’ll pardon the expression again, there’s usually a pretty good story that comes with their “trainsition.”
I’ve heard stories of writers after reading a new author who wrote completely differently than they did being inspired to add some of that style to their writing, thus changing the whole dynamic of the way they wrote. Other times it seemed like a natural progression for them to slowly add in another element to their stories, and yet others were inspired by something not literary at all. I love to hear these stories, when they exist, but of course I need some way to know they exist first.
Thus, since I’m not yet familiar with your writing, the annoying question about genres.
Categorizations may be annoying, often inaccurate, and I agree shouldn’t be at all the focus when you’re *writing* a book, but it’s an essential tool when a person is looking to read a book. The first thing I do, on entering a bookstore, is choose which shelf to head to first, which is usually dictated by my mood. Bookstores, which cater to people like me, organize their shelves according to genre.
Since I probably don’t know much at all about the author I’m about to pick up, I’m at least given a very broad idea of what to expect when her book is in “cozy mysteries”. Being in the mood to read a light story with a minor puzzle in it but that will probably turn out nicely in the end, I pick up the book and read the back, which tells me that it’s about a woman who knits sweaters and spies on her neighbors in order to figure out who’s been stealing neighborhood dogs. Since that sounds quite charming and just the type of thing I feel like reading at the moment, I’ll go ahead and buy it.
It’s all about degrees of information, and a genre question, where you often already know where you stand, is often very good at leading to an answer that’s more like the blurb on the back of the book, or if I’m lucky, the backs of several. Those blurbs are what convince me to try out a new book or author.
So basically, I was asking one question while hoping for an answer to a completely different one. This is, I admit, a pretty fucking stupidly neurotypical thing to do. My only defense is that the answer I was looking for is a pretty NT response, too. If I had been thinking more about what I was looking for in a response, I could have phrased a more suitable question.
My apologies,
Madeline
Ah, I see what you’re asking.
Nevertheless, I still see genre as a marketing category applied to writing after the fact.
“Nine Princes in Amber” is a fantasy novel, but it’s also a Raymond Chandler homage. Does the book change now that you know that?
I was always writing stories I thought I wanted to see in Isaac Asimov’s. But there was a big hole in them labeled “sex” that wouldn’t be filled until I had some. I still think that making fiction with explicit sex a different genre is kind of absurd, like a book written about a civilization where spoons are taboo and the people obsess constantly about soup.