A graduate got in touch the other day, asking to interview me about genre. On the train, yesterday, I started to think.

 I was reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, and came across a short, dismissive allusion to the works published by the Minerva Press. The Minerva press specialised in gothic and romance novels and flourished at the end of the 18^th century. Although Ruth is (so far) about a young orphaned girl, apprenticed to a cruel and capricious dressmaker and seduced and abandoned by a wealthy young man, Gaskell warns us by this illusion that she is not writing Genre Fiction – she is writing Serious Literature.

 It’s a tricky thing.

 A writing friend and former student (I grow my own mates) has always wanted to straddle the lucrative but dangerous divide between Women’s Commercial Fiction and Literary Fiction. I’ve been there myself. No one knew what to do with  Welcome to Eudora. On the book tour, I found it stacked in Literature, Romance, Humour and, long after it should have been there, New Writing.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t get it exactly right. I had the same problem with The Saint Who Loved Me. Not funny enough for the chicklit brigade and not serious enough for the TLS. I don’t think I was as savvy as Gaskell – I don’t think I signalled how serious I was when I wrote those books.

 Like I said, it’s tricky.

 The fact is, genre is more of a marketing than a literary phenomenon. It belongs, truly, to the bookshop and before that, the magazine. The logic is simple: if a group of readers like Mystery or Romance or Sci Fi, make sure they can find it. Put a big sign on a shelf, a big spaceship on the cover. Assume they are not too bright and that their reading is about their class and culture. Also assume the reader will be limited in their literary tastes.

 Today, we may not be so limited by education or class, but we are limited by time. No one wants to pick up a book on the off chance they might like it. Most of us know what we like and want more of it. So genre classifications are alive and well and have even subdivided, hence the chicklit/ladlit/cosy mystery/medieval fantasy literary landscape we inhabit today.

 Although genre writers must, in some way, conform to their genres, they can write Literature as well. Literary authors often write genre – for example, Margaret Atwood writes Sci Fi (but we call it speculative fiction when we’re posh). What these writers do is mange to both fulfil and disappoint genre conventions.

 David Baddiel pointed out something interesting about Genre v Literary. He wrote that while genre fiction reaffirms what we think about something (ethically, or intellectually), literary fiction asks us to question our assumptions.

 I read a recent article about how music works in our brains that relates to this idea of expectation. Sequences of notes produce dopamine – the chemical of pleasure and delight – in our heads. What was particularly interesting to the researchers was that the anticipation of the sequence’s apex was as pleasurable to people as the actual moment of hearing the apex notes.  And when that apex – when what we thought was going to be the next in a sequence of notes – does not occur, and then occurs later, after perhaps several of these build ups to an apex, our pleasure is greater. I’m sure you’ve noticed the same thing with sex…

 Great genre fiction, as with great literature, or great sex, is about the tension between our expectations and what the artist provides us. Too little tension and the narrative lacks the aesthetic shock or intellectual challenge that we associate with great writing. Too much and we find it difficult to read. The more wedded you are to a particular readership, the more you have to cater for the ease of reading, and the less leeway you have for the shock/challenge.

Last night, I read a few chapters where Ruth is bettering herself through study and through association with the Dissenter preacher and his sister who rescued her when she was abandoned by her wealthy seducer. I think both of those chapters would have had a red line drawn through them by the editors of the Minerva Press.  

So, you’re about to become an author. And people will (gratifyingly)  ask about you. So you (willing to share and to become a Personality) begin to talk about your cottage in the Cotswolds, or how poor you were as a child, or how you’ve travelled the world with your diplomatic service partner.

Mistake.

Already, you’ve made a big mistake.

Then they’ll ask you about your book and what inspired you to write it. And then you’ll talk about the interesting girl you met when you were backpacking around Thailand and your love of 18th century sailing ships and how stories of betrayal have always interested you.

And that will be the nail in your coffin. You’re already done for. You’re already nobody. You’ve just talked yourself into the common herd.

I did the same thing…but now I know better. I now know what some people are born knowing and what some people learn from their literary friends. I’ve learned it the hard way.  I know how to talk about my writing. I know how to talk about what inspired me and about my life as an author.

I’d love to tell you everything: right here, right now. But it would take too long. Come to this workshop, if you can, or ask me to come to you. And learn it the easy way, before you’re seven books into your career!

BTW: I say the workshop is May 19th…it’s May 18th – Saturday!!!!!

 

We’ve seen it before. There is, say, a mass murderer in the news. On a round-table news programme that evening will be a leading figure in the police, a criminal psychologist, and then someone who has written fiction about a serial killer. Currently, because of the world-wide protest over the way rape is handled in India, Arundhati Roy’s interviews, blogs and essays about the subject are in much demand.

But what do we know? What do writers really know about the things they write about?

We are notoriously outsiders…we lurk and observe. We chase up bits of evidence from strange sources (I used the data from Hurricane Katrina survivors to estimate how long it would take before Bristol and Bath were uninhabitable for the novel I’m currently writing) and apply it willy-nilly, without proper training, to our narratives. Our job is all about making things convincing, not about getting our facts right.

So what do we really know?

What we do well is wonder and guess. A novel can be seen as a form of investigation, a long wondering about something. I think of my work as if I was walking around the cage of a giant beast, poking it with a stick. I’m not in charge of catching the beast. I’m not in charge of noting its reactions or making decisions on its captivity. My job is just the poking.

We wonder and we ask. And we make shadows of the world; shadows that in one way, have no truth at all…but in another…

You see our value isn’t in what we do, but why we do it. We think, when we begin a book, that we can imagine ourselves into another world, another body, another self.  We realise, about halfway through that this isn’t going to work, that we are only writing another story, but it doesn’t make the yearning go away, or make the effort we put into trying any less.

If we weren’t, as humans, aware of our consciousness and aware that there are other consciousnesses, we wouldn’t have the yearning in the first place. We want, so badly, to escape ourselves; to experience the world in other ways, to learn what we in our own circumstances can’t learn, to eat what we in our own circumstances can’t eat, to love the people that we in our own circumstances can’t love.

Writers just want that more; we want those stories so much that we’ll spend years of our lives writing them.  And these, the truthless shadows that we make, can be so powerful, such useful ways into understanding that we sometimes get a phone call to come and sit around a table and talk about what we don’t really know.

 

Current MS

Blazing 89641

Hospital High

 

My whole life is a balancing act: work/family, faith/doubt, writer/teacher, writer/friend, writer/mother (I think I’ve already said that one). I’m just about to get a dog, so soon I can feel guilty about not spending enough time with the cat, as well.

But in the contemporary world of letters, there’s another kind of balancing act – creating/promoting.

You may notice (at least I HOPE you noticed) that I’ve been gone awhile. That’s because time has been particularly crunched lately. In the last four weeks, I’ve externally examined for three universities, spent two weeks in the American Midwest, attended a wedding in Wales, hosted my writing group/ a dinner party/and my long-term guest, and did my various volunteer roles. Plus my job and writing my book and looking after my daughter.

Something had to give – and it was my outward-facing authorial dialogue with the world.  Much better to ease up on promotion than not to have anything to promote. The writing has to come first! I did the MA with someone who was so good at self-promotion that I thought, at one point, she was going to land an agent before she’d written a word. But she never did actually write her book…

I wish I had her talent at that…but I don’t. And when time gets particularly tight; when the plates are all falling off my spinning sticks, I still have to find time to write one sentence. And then another. And then another. And then another 500 or so.

Hope all is well with your creative work. And now that my houseguest is gone home, the marking is caught up and the chapter is off to the printer, I’ll see you soon.