Now that I’ve finished my foray into Shakespearean biographies and Elizabethan conspiracy theories, it’s time to get back to work.
Writing work, that is.
This project will be my tenth novel, and it will be a big departure from my previous books. Frankly, it’s got me scared pissless. But, as any great artist will tell you, if it doesn’t scare you, it’s not worth doing.
Up ’til now, all my novels have been–to greater or lesser extents–genre books. Alternate history, speculative fiction, high fantasy, science fiction…sort of… And therein lies my difficulty. My work has not been your classic genre fiction fare. I’ve been a genre-bender and a genre-blender, mixing and matching, breaking unwritten “rules” of genre expectations, and basically writing good but essentially unmarketable books. My novels don’t fit into any of the easily marketable pigeonholes (except possibly steampunk… Thank you, all you Steampunk fans!) and this gives agents and publishers the willies. What I get is a lot of “Great book, but not for us” type rejection letters and “Please send us your next” quasi-encouragements.
While I truly believe that genre elements are integral to all of my books to-date, I also would have to admit that those genre elements are not central to the stories they tell. Essential, but not central; that’s my oeuvre. But what it means is that readers of alternate histories, high fantasy, science fiction, etc. are dissatisfied. I don’t tick all the boxes.
I understand this. I accept this. But ticking someone else’s boxes is not the most important thing for me as a writer. What’s important to me is growing as a writer, and writing as well as I can at any given time.
So…onward.
My next project–rather than a genre work with mainstream elements–will be a mainstream work with genre elements. I have the basic plot outlined (or, more accurately, “sketched”) and the essential structure of the novel in mind. But with this novel, I have a particular style in mind. Think Alice Hoffman meets Julio Cortazar.
And thus, my first writing task is…to read. For the next month or so, I’ll be reading both Hoffman and Cortazar, but specifically with an eye to analyzing their style. There’s a certain…atmospheric quality to their prose that I want to understand. I’m playing with ideas about what tense to use, what voice. Present tense? Past tense? First person? Third person? What level of omniscience?
I’ll share my opinions as they form, my discoveries and observations as they crop up. Wish me luck.
k
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white.
This, to me, is a stylish, complex sentence. It’s not what you read today in most ‘commercial’ genre fiction. It’s from the opening of Treasure Island.
Comparing the first pages of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, I prefer the latter.
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I’m going to the bookstore, today. I’ll look for Zafón. Any titles you’d recommend, aside from the one above?
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I haven’t read any Zafón apart from the ‘first pages’ preview of Shadow on Amazon, but it’s certainly something I would read. Let me see what I make of Blow Up (naturally I’ve seen the Antonioni film…)
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I’ll check out those pages on Zafón as well. As I mentioned, it was the “Axolotl” story from the Blow-Up collection that has stayed with me for..what?…20 years? And after only one reading, that’s impressive. To be fair, though, a lot of credit has to be given to the translator; I did NOT read it in the original Spanish.
Another author often mentioned with Cortazar is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The whole “magic realism” sub-genre of mainstream fiction (did I just explode your brain with that?) is sort of where I’ll be going with this new book. I should probably read Love in the Time of Cholera, too.
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Gabo, of course. And no, you don’t surprise me with magic realism (it’s a natural for me). Who translated the Axolotl you read?
Twenty years, a mere shadow of a moment.
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I don’t remember the translator’s name, but I think I had the same edition that’s available on Amazon (pub. 1985, which is about the correct time). Paul Blackburn is the translator of that edition.
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I struck out at the bookstore. No Cortazar, no Marquez, no Zafon. Well, I tried, independent used bookstore…now off to the interwebs…
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You think you have problems? Try living on an remote island! (hint: bookstores here are as rare as leprosy–well, thank goodness for that).
I struck out with Amazon’s Look Inside for Blow Up. I’ll have to order it in!
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There are some versions of “Axolotl” found online, if you want a taste.
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I read the first pages of Axolotl on scribd, and what a sublime gustatory experience it was. If you write a book like this, Kurt, I will gladly buy it!
I’ll order a hard copy of Axolotl. I can get Shadow on Kindle, so I’ll start there.
You realize that you will have to move to South America in order to truly know the extraordinary nimbus over the continent (naturally I refer to Borges).
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I ordered a copy of Cortazar, Marquez, and Zafon for this startup project. As for the style in “Axolotl,” I doubt I can match it, much less keep it up for an entire novel…and that would likely make for impenetrable prose, anyway. And then we’re back to inaccessibility.
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Excellent. Now let’s synchronize watches–we’ll both start a novel as of today… and see where that takes us. I’m thinking of a romance, but with difficult language, and I worry most about impenetrability. This will be an issue for you too since you are courting Cortazar (how wonderfully alliterative!). You will write much faster that I will since you have a lot of experience–I’ll forever be stuck behind you, in a ditch.
I read a few pages of Practical Magic. That’s far more commercial and maybe the middle ground you are looking for.
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Alas, I am not a fast writer (see post on “Swoopers and Bashers.”) And aside from reading, my writerly project right now is getting the Fallen Cloud Saga out for Kindle. Experience means nothing for speed!
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Still, you will be faster since I like to think like the Chinese, that is, in three hundred year cycles (and he thought magic realism would stump him!)
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Okay. Agreed. It will take me somewhat less than 300 years to complete my book. 🙂
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Kurt, do you have any specific passages in mind when you talk of Julio Cortazar’s atmospheric style?
How do you feel about Carlos Ruiz Zafón?
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I do not know Zafón at all, and to be honest, I have only read Cortazar’s short fiction. I will be rereading “Axolotl” and some of the other stories from the “Blow-up” collection.
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Thanks for your answer, Kurt.
I associate ‘mainstream’ with a work that is accessible. Lumping literature in with ‘mainstream’ seems problematic since many ‘literary’ works are not accessible and will never garner a large audience.
Let me turn to the cinema for an example. Solaris, a film by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, is considered a science fiction film. There’s that ‘genre’ epithet again (how troublesome that it creeps up so vigorously and without the sunshine of common sense). But Solaris is no more a science fiction film than I am a fire breathing lizard (which, alas, I am not, though such a reincarnation would not incompatible with my true pyroclastic self). Solaris has a few rocket ships in it–yes, that’s true, but to call it a science fiction is somewhat misleading. It’s a Tarkovsky film. Period.
We have thus established that Solaris is not a science fiction film (even though it bears some of the hallmarks of the genre). It is also fair to say that it isn’t a mainstream film either. The genre/mainstream dichotomy does not fit as tidily as one might hope. In my view, we are not dealing exclusively with an either/or choice. I think that the key concept is accessibility.
When you speak of Practical Magic and The Handmaid’s Tale, you are making the argument for accessibility as a prerequisite for inclusion into the mainstream/general/literature bosom. The Solaris example illustrates the opposite view. It isn’t genre fiction, and it isn’t accessible.
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Remember, though, that Solaris was originally a science-fiction novel by Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, and the novel, with its emphasis on astrobiology and human/non-human communication, is undeniably science-fiction. The version you cite (which I haven’t seen), much like the more recent Soderbergh version (2002), drops almost all of the “science fiction” aspects of the novel, but regardless, neither film was able to (or probably sought to) dissociate itself from its original source’s science fiction roots.
But “genre,” in publishing and in movie-making, is primarily a marketing term. Most genre books fall solidly within the boundaries of their category, but some of them successfully stretch the limits. It’s the reason we have sub-genres like hard sci-fi, social sci-fi, alternate history, etc. These are still all marketing tools; pigeonholes for publishers to put a book into so the public can have a good guess at what’s inside. Then there are “crossover” books, like science-fiction detective novels. How to market those? As sf? As a detective novel? There isn’t a spot in the bookstore for “Off-World Police Procedurals,” is there?
So, I don’t see accessibility as the determining factor for the label of “mainstream” fiction. There are plenty of completely accessible genre works. It all comes down to marketability. In both my examples, it isn’t accessibility that makes them mainstream, but a combination of two main factors.
First, is the author known as a non-genre writer? Then don’t put her book in science-fiction or no one will find it! Neither Hoffman nor Atwood were known for sf/f works, so placing their books there would have been publisher suicide. The other factor is: how heavily does the novel rely on its genre elements? Both of my examples are strong character-centric works which give non-genre readers most of what they like–not meaning they’re accessible, but merely meaning that the books more closely meet the mainstream buyer’s expectations. Practical Magic isn’t about witches and The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t about a resistance movement under a dystopic government; they’re about the women at the center of the story.
One could say the same about many sf/f novels, but a book set on an alien planet written by Ursula LeGuin is going to be labeled science fiction, and publishers will pray for a mainstream crossover. The same book written by Toni Morrison would be labeled literature/mainstream and wouldn’t even see the shadow of the science fiction shelves.
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First of all, thank you, Kurt, for taking the time and effort to answer my questions. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness of your responses.
Genre is the anathema of a filmmaker such as Tarkovsky. He fought bitterly with Lem about the science fiction aspects of the book (and excised most of them). Tarkovsky’s version is an examination of conscience and the mirrory existence of another planet earth–very different from Lem’s book.
I’m not sure that we are using the term accessibility in the same way. What do you mean by it?
For me, Tarkovsky’s Solaris is not a science fiction. It’s not in any genre–it’s a Tarkovsky film. But is also isn’t accessible. What do I mean by that? I mean that the slow pacing of the film, for instance, makes it inaccessible to a modern Western audience (just as the long takes of a Béla Tarr film alienate Western audiences).
The answer to the long takes of cinema is literature’s long and complex sentence structure (sprinkled with ‘difficult’ vocabulary). This too can alienate the reader audience. This is what I mean by accessibility, or by contrast, inaccessibility, its coeval cousin).
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You are quite welcome, ep. I’m not the Oracle of Delphi, but I have picked up a bit of how this all works.
I suspect your definition of “accessibility” and mine aren’t too far off. I would put Dan Brown and James Joyce at opposite ends of the spectrum, as far as language, syntax, meaning, allusion, etc., are concerned. Proust is inaccessible because of sentence length. Joyce is inaccessible due to sheer opaqueness of language. Dan Brown is easy to read (bland, even). So as far as that goes, I think you and I agree on what it means.
However, there’s another type of “accessibility” when it comes to genre fiction. There are tropes that come with the territory, and with which long-time fans are already familiar but which can be off-putting to someone newly-arrived in that genre. Hard science fiction can be impenetrable to someone who hasn’t read any before, or to someone who isn’t scientifically literate. Likewise, the jargon of a police procedural can really be hard to understand for someone who hasn’t watched crime shows or read crime fiction before. That’s another level of accessibility.
And so, back to The Handmaid’s Tale, the book has science fiction elements but those elements are not so thick on the ground that a non-science-fiction reader would get tripped up by them. Atwood’s book, by my definition(s), is therefore accessible in two ways: by being relatively both language-friendly and genre-neutral.
You’ve got me really intrigued by your description of Tarkovsky’s film, though. I found it at Blockbuster and have it in my queue. Thanks!
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What is ‘mainstream work?’ (And why don’t you consider your books to be mainstream?)
What do you find more alienating–style or straying from the genre mold?
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Hey, ep. Thanks for stopping by today. And good questions; sometimes it’s good to define one’s terminology.
By “mainstream” I mean essentially all novels that are not genre works. This is a common use of the term in writing circles (well, in my writing circles, anyway). In a bookstore, you’ll see genre works separated out as Mystery, Thriller, Horror, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Romance, etc., and then there will be a larger group labeled “General” or “Literature” or something. That is where you’ll find “mainstream” fiction. Since all of my novels contain major elements of various genres, they’ve never been marketed as mainstream/general/literature.
Some authors walk the fine but fuzzy line between genre and mainstream–Hoffman’s Practical Magic and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are perfect cases-in-point; books that contain strong genre elements but either by popularity or tone are still marketed as mainstream. My next book will be doing this (I hope).
Which do I find more daunting? Definitely stepping out of the “genre” box. Style to a great degree is technique. Just as, when I was playing viola, I learned and mastered different techniques for Mozart versus Hindemith, so can I write in different styles: First person versus third person, lyrical versus wry, metaphorical versus descriptive, action versus introspection. I know that holding this new style I’m striving for though the length of the novel will be a challenge, but nothing that can’t be fixed in rewrites.
Stepping outside of the genre box, however…that scares me. Why? Because I have nothing to wrap the plot around but the characters and the action. And if the plot is boring, well, that can’t be fixed with a simple rewrite.
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Good luck, Kurt. And good luck to Creative Metaphor too.
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Thanks!
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Well, I have something that is probably a rather large failing: I neither know nor care what the current market is. I write because I love to write. I’m only vaguely aware of what’s been published lately, and usually only because people are crying about it on tumblr or they’ve made a movie about it.
I prefer more classic books and styles. My favorite authors are Tolkien, Austen, yes, even Shakespeare… though Pratchett isn’t classic, I definitely love the feel of his writing. The only book I’ve read that’s been published in the last several years is Hunger Games, and I only just read the first one last weekend, so I really am not up on modern times.
Guess it’s a good thing my aim isn’t to get published but to write my book. 😉
I do believe, however, that Ploughman Chronicles might need to be high on my ‘read next’ list… I’ve been pondering which of your books to start with and I believe that just tipped me in favor. 🙂
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The Ploughman books are available on Kindle, too, if that’s a selling point. Set in 9th c. Brittany, a clash of Celtic and Roman cultures, the end of the Dark Ages, Nordic raiders, ley lines and earth magic. Where did I go wrong? 😉
You bring up a good point, though. I believe that the main reason my books don’t neatly fall into one genre is simply because I don’t read extensively in one genre. I read a lot of classics (Thackeray, Austen, Wilkie, Dickens), and a lot of mainstream (Hoffman, Erdich). I consumed fantasy and sci-fi as a kid, but loved the “less strict” fiction of Bradbury, Zelazney, Cherryh, and LeGuin and over the nuts-and-bolts/elves-and-wizards stuff. I read thrillers and mysteries, both new and old. I also read a lot of non-fiction–historical, sociological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological.
Is it any wonder my output is as blended as my input?
So, let’s encourage each other to enjoy the process, thrill with the miracle of creation, and to love what we write, eh?
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HUZZAH! Yes indeed, I think genres are nice, but not necessarily hard and fast rules. They’re convenient for selling, but very inconvenient for writing.
…
We should totally get together and have a glass of wine or something and toast to luck and Odin for success 🙂
Or something like that.
I don’t have a kindle, is it available in actual book form? Or just digital? I’ll get it either way but I prefer to hold books.
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Absolutely ALL (caps/italics/underline) of my novels are available in hardcopy. I insist. Unfortunately, hardcopy product is more expensive than e-product.
Oh, and Kindle can be read on PC or iPad or most tablets…not just on Kindle. Not everyone knows that.
But a real book, yes. They are available for all titles.
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Oh I know, but reading for long periods on the computer hurts my eyes, and I really like the feel of curling up with a book. 🙂
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I concur wholeheartedly. Especially good ones. 😉
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… If I ever win the lottery, I’m going to start a publishing company called Bridging The Gap, and it will specialize in cross-genre publishing. 😀
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Or called “No One Thing”.
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I’ve always wondered about that. I never liked the fact that I could write (for a bad example) Romance. Or Sci-Fi. But not a Sci-Fi Romance. And no, I have no desire to write Romance, it’s just the first example that sprang to mind. I’ve wondered if that would happen if I couldn’t fit into one neat category, and I guess the answer is people don’t like it when things don’t fit into neat categories.
And It’s amusing that you posted this today! As of yesterday I’m writing what I hope to be my first viable novel. 🙂
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Almost forgot: GOOD LUCK! 🙂
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American frontier spiritual alternate history. (The Fallen Cloud Saga)
Time-travel adventure romance. (Unraveling Time)
Suspense supernatural near-future thriller. (Dreams of the Desert Wind)
Historical high-fantasy. (The Ploughman Chronicles)
Been there. Done that. Have the scars to prove it.
I will correct you on one thing, though: Lots of people do like fiction that doesn’t fit into neat categories. Marketers and publishers don’t because they’re hard to market, and if you try to cram any of the above examples into a single-genre package, the readers (who expect truth in advertizing) will be disappointed. If we (i.e., they) adopted a broader method of marketing, one that celebrated and emphasized the differences rather than trying to hide them, I think we’d find a much greater enthusiasm in the marketplace.
But congratulations on starting your new project. I hope you’ll write the story you want to tell, though, and not twist it too much to fit the market.
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