Michael Collings (who is one of my favorite people in the world, I love hearing him share his thoughts on writing, literature, and just about anything else that’s on his mind) made a very important point about genre on Facebook in reply to my last post.  Here’s what he said:

There is nothing that says a novel can’t be legitimately cross- or multi-generic.. Dean Koontz has been blending psychological terror, supernatural horror, thriller, romance, adventure, historical, science-fiction (especially alternate history), and fantasy for years, and the results are often immensely enjoyable novels that speak to wider audiences than would otherwise be possible.

 This is a really important point.  Genre is by definition a “loose category of composition,” with the emphasis on loose.  They are arrived upon by experimentation and the resulting convention that follows.  They are not static, concrete concepts; they are certainly not boxes or molds into which stories must fit.  Just as Michael remarked, many of the best stories successfully adopt and employ conventions from multiple genres into a cohesive whole.   

So what does that mean?  It means that genre should not be an omnipresent driving or defining guide for either writers or readers; however, knowing the genre in which you’re writing can be important for a few reasons.  

When you’re composing something, whether a written story or a painting or a verbal statement or whatever, awareness of your audience is a rhetorical necessity for effective communication.  The conventions of a genre give us rough guidelines we can use to shape our message for better effect.  Fantasy readers tend to appreciate the impossible presented as plausible, whereas readers of courtroom thrillers are more likely to engage in a story predicated upon a more literal representation of reality as we experience it.  That tells us as writers that if we’re trying to reach Terry Pratchett fans we’d be better served to write stories that are more Pratchett-like than Grisham-ish.

Pratchett-like > Grisham-ish?  Not exactly a scalpel of a compositional tool, is it.  And you know, it’s a wonderful thing that it isn’t.  The moment we come up with exact recipes for narrative is the moment stories stop being told, because we’ll have all relevant perspectives already.  (This will never happen, by the way, so long as a single human being exists.)  So why is genre talked about so often in publishing?  Look at it from an agent’s viewpoint.  If you pitch a story, she wants to know that you have crafted your novel so that it will be attractive to a wide and, hopefully, partially established and identified audience.  If you can’t lump your book into the very loose conventions of established genres, what is she supposed to think?  This story is for older military men who are now pacifists and prefer their symbolism to trend toward fauna, particularly the large predators of the Russian steppe.  Think that will excite her?  Nope, no more than, “There’s something in my story for everyone.”  If you tell her your story is psychological horror, not only can she assume that readers of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Ira Levin, and Edgar Allen Poe may like it and fans of Louisa May Alcott or Helen Fielding probably won’t, but also that you’re familiar with the ideas and tastes of these readers.

This is, I believe, a much more important function of genre.  Yes, it’s important to be able to pitch your work so that an agent or editor will buy it, and that requires being able to tell them where stores will shelve your book; far more important is reading lots of the same things your desired audience is reading so you’re a part of their discourse community.  Communication differs among groups.  Not just in the languages they speak, but in the ideas and emotions they share and explore, and in conventions they create to commuicate successfully.  

Genres work similarly.  Readers of Brandon Sanderson are likely to have read Tolkien, Eddings, Hobbs, and McCaffrey; they’re also more likely than many others to have read C.S. Lewis, Phillip Pullman, and Lloyd Alexander.  This means that these individuals are conversant in certain ideas, symbols, and systems that most others are not.  If you’re writing for these people you sure better have a sense of what they like and don’t like, what they find interesting or perplexing, and especially what became passe decades ago because Piers Anthony or Marion Zimmer Bradley already did it. 

Here’s an analogy: let’s look at all of literature as a cocktail party.  No matter where you are inside the party you hear the buzz of conversation, and everyone in the room has enough in common that they are talking about the same types of things in the generic: occupations, family, recreation, and the like.  People meet each other, make polite chit-chat for a while, and then move on to discuss very similar things with new individuals.  A genre might be considered the subgroups that form within the room to discuss particulars of these broad subjects.  If you abruptly slide into these conversations, you can’t just use the same old lines you’ve used to board passing partygoers in the past.  Here, you’ve got to listen and learn to know what is going on, especially if you want to make a comment that will mark you as anything but completely ignorant.

That’s what genre allows: it is a tool that helps us take part in an ongoing conversation among a specific group of readers so that we can become well-enough informed to add our own voice in a way that will be appreciated.  If a group at the party is discussing the designated batter rule in baseball, you don’t want to blurt out, “That’s the one where the players skate, right?”  Just the same, if readers are enthralled by the seductive nature of evil in the work of Thomas Harris, you don’t want to give them a book based on the premise that truly bad stuff has no place in fiction and so you’ve written a story about a stolen garden gnome (which could be a hilarious book if written for the right reasons and for people who would appreciate it).       

To wrap up: genre isn’t a rule, it’s a tool, like almost everything else in writing.  Use it to reassure prospective editors that you have an idea what type of person will like your book and where the store can shelve it; more importantly, use it to help you write to better effect for the people that are moved by the same ideas, challenges, and passions that drive you.               

And I love scrums. 

So, after my diatribe on non-fiction (to which I am prone, periodically) and its having its own celebratory month, like NaNoWriMo, ForeverTeal pointed out a few supposed holes in my claim of a fiction centered cosmos.  I will address each of these in order below. 

ForeverTeal wrote: 

Response from “The World Out There”:

April - National Poetry Month, complete with NaPoWriMo established in 1996 (3 years before NaNoWriMo) by the American Academy of Poets (to reject poetry as a nonentity would be to disown W.H.Auden whose work you have claimed to enjoy though not understood which men never can anyway per your conclusion that emotion is a purely feminine construct); also National Card and Letter Writing Month.

While I do like Auden (E.E. Cummings, Poe, and Lewis Carroll also have work I enjoy), I don’t think that affection extends to a claim of ownership.  As for the existence of a poetry month, well, of course!  What else do you do with an endangered species?  You give it its own preserve to try to keep it breathing.  (I don’t say this with relish; quite the contrary.  While poetry is not my proverbial cup of tea, it is a near religion to others, and I don’t think we’re better off for its precipitous decline over the last sixty or so years.)  More to the point, poetry is far closer to fiction than non-fiction because of its emphasis on meaning (which is emotionally predicated).  Fiction is about truth—or you could say meaning or relevance.  Non-fiction, especially of the narrative variety, aspires to that, but always within the burdensome constraints of fact and veracity.  By striving for both ends, it knows it can achieve neither.  Meaning requires interpretation, and interpretation pollutes fact.  Uninterpreted facts (which means unorganized facts) are meaningless, while interpreted facts are not pure.  Poetry, like fiction, emphasizes meaning to the point of disregarding veracity when needed, in most cases.  Because of this kinship, I find it reasonable to offer poetry a month without risking the unraveling of all creation. 

As for a month dedicated to letter writing, this is clearly a memorial, as letter writing is dead.  Sad but true.  At least there isn’t a National Texting Month.     

November - in addition to NaNoWriMo, Family Stories Month (family stories usually being memoirs/bios/autobios which are generally nonfiction though not always purely) and National Life Writing Month; also Dear Santa Letter Month

Let’s be honest: most family stories are fictional.  They may be “based on a true story,” but ask any genuine non-fiction writer just how much respect that term deserves.  Family stories aren’t about what happened; they’re about how people responded to what happened.  That response is so important that it tends to change over time with the needs of the family.  This need for change is so powerful that the catalytic event will change as well so as to better fit the interpretive needs of the storytellers over time.  When a family or life story is recorded well, it communicates a genuine emotional response to something.  When fiction is written well, it does the exact same thing.  The factual basis of what provoked the emotional response is, largely or completely, irrelevant.  If I write a contemporary novel well and tell you it’s true, and you believe it, its impact on you is that of non-fiction.  Veracity has nothing to do with any of this; the perception of veracity does.  The only life stories that can truly be categorized as bordering on factual are listed dates, names, and events done by strict chronology.  And come on, who wants a whole month of that?

December - National Write a Business Plan Month and Write to a Friend Month

The best way to ensure you have no friends is to speak and act always out of unpolluted honesty and to treat fact as immutable.  No friendship can survive without a kind and wise dose of periodic fiction.  Often times, the best in us is brought out by our friends telling us stories about ourselves that aren’t strictly true.  As for National Write a Business Plan Month, when did you last consider someone writing “Invent invisible glasses, sell a billion, get rich” less than fictional?  And I officially motion for December to be changed to National Write a World Domination Plan Month.   

Other months of interest:
January - National Book Blitz Month (feature book on a relevant website: 1,000 Places to See Before You Die [or atomize] - a nonfiction work)

The more non-fiction (true not merely named such) books such a site includes, the less relevant said site becomes.

February - Library Lovers Month (notice nonfiction genre sections when you next visit aforesaid institution)

You do know that those non-fiction sections are just for the books that haven’t been caught in their madeupness yet, right?

October - National Book Month (note the various forms of aforementioned genre)

This one you simply misunderstand.  As October is my birthday, this month is in celebration of my book.  Note that “Book” is singular, see?

December - Read a New Book Month (note that books come in the nonfiction variety and thus exist, noteably one Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass - a NONFICTION book I purchased yesterday, largely due to your recommendation of it at a workshop I attended. Care to retract any such non-entity statements?

Donald Maass’s books are good and, as non-narrative forms, they have a closer claim to non-fiction than most books that boast such.  Does that deserve a month in such books’ honor?  That’s really irrelevant, isn’t it.  After all, December is already taken: it’s National Write a World Domination Plan Month. 

Which begs the question: Are your opinions fictional or non-fictional? The implications of the first scenario are quite amusing. Those of the second mean you yourself are a non-entity.

If you define non-fiction as factual and verifiable, my opinions are closer to fiction—which does not mean unreal or unmeaningful.  Quite the contrary.  All our opinions move beyond pure documentation of fact; we move through this world making stuff up as we go.  The only difference is I don’t feel comfortable hiding that much of what I make up is actually made up.  I don’t hang a non-fiction trapping on it.  

Now, no quibbling, driveling, or dithering. Before you completely dissolve, please distill your atoms so that “Essence of Clint Johnson” remains as a trophy of my momentary victory and my antagonist’s demise in the latest battle of wits.

Warning to readers: this is what happens when you ask an innocent question and are subjected to public harangue. It is curiously a simultaneous honor and humiliation worthy regardless of some manner of retort.

Yes, this is exactly what happens, that is exactly how it feels.

(And just for the record, ForeverTeal is a good friend, and we pick on each other like this often.  So no comments about my being abusive, please.  After all, Teal knows that I’m the one perpetually picked on.)