Beyond Genre
Donald Maass on Aug 12 2009 | Filed under: Business, CRAFT
Getting published is an achievement for any novelist. Staying published is harder. More difficult still is reaching higher levels of success, from breaking out to becoming a brand name.
Where does that ultimate stage of the journey begin? Many authors break into the business writing some type of genre fiction. It’s a great way to start. Plot foundations are in place. There is a ready audience. Reviews and even awards can be won.
Genre writing, however, can also be a trap. Plot patterns can become a crutch. Characters can conform to fan expectations and genre conventions. Easily renewed contracts make genre boundaries safe and reliable.
Genre writers, I find, can get so stuck in their comfort zone that they can’t find their way out of it. The larger scale of breakout level plots becomes intimidating. Their characters stay small. It’s as if authors’ imaginations have atrophied. What is really happening is that they are afraid.
At the same time, much best selling fiction incorporates genre elements. Have you every read the latest literary-slash-commercial best seller and felt, “Hey, that’s really just a mystery”—or romance, or SF story—“and it’s not that different from what I write. What gives, here?”
What gives is that those literary-slash-commercial authors are writing bigger stories, and that in turn means that the purpose behind the novels is larger. They are not merely dressing up a mystery, romance or fantasy. They are writing novels whose subjects are really something else.
To understand what makes literary-slash-commercial fiction larger, try analyzing it this way. Pick such a novel. Now mentally subtract the genre element. Pretend it isn’t there. Okay, what is left? That is what the author is really writing about. That is what lifts this novel beyond genre.
A literary agent in New York, Donald Maass’s agency sells more than 150 novels every year to major publishers in the U.S. and overseas. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004) and The Fire in Fiction (2009). He is a past president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, Inc.
You can order The Fire in Fiction online, and learn more about it from the publisher.
Photo courtesy Flickr’s nurpax
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I think it can be dangerous to be “just” a literary writer too. That’s the mindset that is often encouraged (or you feel like it’s encouraged, anyway) in university settings. But what that usually makes is really beautiful writing about nothing. And I think most people would rather read a good story with “rougher” prose than good writing with a “rough” story, you know?
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Oh, that said, I love the books that bend and cross over, as this post suggests! Like Time Traveler’s Wife (literary scifi?) or Nora Roberts (romance with strong writing).
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It almost seems like you’re saying here that fitting in a genre category and having a breakout level plot are mutually exclusive. I hope that’s not the case! I can think of plenty of good genre novels with intricate and intriguing plots, but that still fit cleanly within genre boundaries. Lord of the Rings, Ender’s Game/Speaker for the Dead …
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How ironic, I have been pondering this very topic for months.
Let’s see if I can pinpoint the difference, from the point of view of what I feel after reading genre vs. literary/fiction.
After reading a suspense/thriller for example, (Brad Meltzer, John Grisham, Ken Follett) I think: “wow, cool book” and “this guy was pretty clever with the plot.” But nothing earth shattering. Sure the characters were drawn well, the writing was, well, coherent at least and it was a page turner. But (and this is a BIG BUT) I still felt EMPTY at the end of the novel.
Now, lets take novels like (To Kill a Mockingbird, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day, Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami) these are novels that I still can’t get out of my head … they’re sort of engrained in my mind. Why? On top of the excellent writing, the novel appeared to be about something, much, much larger than simply getting from point A to point B, nothing seemed contrived, and the end of the book, you felt like you lived with these characters.
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That final suggestion is a tremendous tool. Thank you for that.
When I first saw your topic, though, I had a different question. I can’t stop writing, but every novel seems to come out in a different genre. Is that a good/bad thing for writers seeking representation?
And … let’s say I sent in a query to your agency for one novel, and it was declined. Would it make sense for me to send your agency a query for a novel of a different genre now?
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