Genre of Fiction

The word genre has different meanings, even in the literary world. There's the broadness of it, meaning there are three genres: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. Then there is the more detailed definition for each category. This post is all about the genres of fiction.

Let's start with literary fiction. Literary fiction is the fiction that ends up in high school classrooms and college lit classes thirty years from now. Character comes before plot always. Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne are classic examples. Lorrie Moore, Charles Baxter, and Ron Carlson are modern day examples.

-A subgenre of this, that I feel necessary to elaborate on is Experimental Fiction. Although some could consider this a separate genre, I'm throwing it in here. This is the fiction that breaks some or all of the rules of traditional fiction. Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce are classic examples of this. Mark Danielewski is a modern example.

Commercial/Mainstream Fiction is fiction that has no category. The goal is to entertain and nothing more, usually. Plot comes before character. Chuck Palahniuk's early novels and Denis Johnson are good examples of this category. So is Jodi Piccoult, although I've never read anything by her.

Now for those genres which have more rigid definitions:

Horror: fiction which is designed to scare/frighten/generally creep out the reader. Everyone knows Stephen King, and there are Peter Straub, Dean Koontz, Richard Matheson, and Bram Stoker.

-Subgenre to note! Dark Fiction is very similar to horror, but dark fiction does not necessarily intend to scare the reader (though it often ends up doing that). It deals with the macabre just as much, and shows (appropriately enough) the dark side of humanity.

Sci-Fi/Fantasy: these two are always grouped together, for good reasons. Both deal with what doesn't exist in this world. The difference lies in why it doesn't exist. Fantasy is about is impossible no matter how far technology advances (magic, for example). Sci-Fi deals with what isn't possible now, but could be in the future. Sometimes, Sci-Fi will also use current or soon to be current technology and its implications. Asimov, Heinlein, and Clark are the biggest examples of Sci-fi. Tolkein and Rowling are the biggest examples of fantasy.

Thriller: These are the real page turners. Think Dan Brown and John Grisham. There are many subgenres for this. Character is always secondary, sometimes tertiary to the plot. Time constraints are good, death is better, and a possible terrorist attack is best. These will always be criticized the most by literary critics, because the author doesn't care about making it art, he cares about giving the reader a fun time. Many of these become movies.

Crime/Mystery: as plot oriented as a thriller, but with a different style and focus. Almost always they start with a murder. The goal then is to figure out who the murderer is. Sherlock Holmes is one of the biggest characters in the origins of mysteries, but it has progressed much from then, with new technologies, forensics, and all sorts of things.

Romance/Erotic: These are NOT love stories. I would throw love stories under commercial fiction (Nicholas Sparks' books). Romance novels and Erotic fiction is about the passion and love scenes thrown in there. In a way, it's porn in book form, which means guys refuse to read it. Love stories, in contrast, focus on the love part and not the sex part, the scandalous part, or anything similar. A love story wants you to cry at some point, it wants you to feel attached to the characters.

So what's the point of listing and describing many of the genres of fiction? It's always good to know where you fit, because that's what you'll be using when you look for an agent and a publisher. Although the lines can cross (Danielewski is both Horror and Experimental), it's good to know which category is primary, and which is secondary. I stick to literary (and recently experimental) and dark fiction. So I know not to send a novel query to an agent who specializes in Thrillers. They won't want it. Nor will a literary agent want anything to do with a science fiction novel.

Also, I'm not trying to get you to define yourself by one of these categories. That would be wrong. Instead, if you write a novel one day, write it first, then decide on which category fits it best. If you see it breaking into other categories, that means you can find an agent who specializes in both and hopefully end up with a better deal with a publisher. If you have a horror novel that's experimental, then send to an agent who does both, and they'll hook you up better than an agent who only does horror or one who only does experimental. But write first, think of genre second. Always.

Finishing a First Draft

I'm so excited right now! I just finished the first draft of a short story that has taken me a week and a half to write. It should only be three or four more weeks of revisions before I can pleased with it. But what I have right now is full of promise.

I've decided to move into more of an experimental genre of literary writing. Mostly this means that I'm breaking rules for a specific effect, and the normal chronological narrative doesn't hold true. And man does it not hold true! It's a second person point-of-view story in a chronology that Quentin Tarantino would be proud of. It's my first completed story in the second person (which means that the central character is referred to as You). Most stories/novels are 1st person (I, me) or 3rd person (he/she, him/her). 2nd person was a new challenge because it requires the author to force the reader into a situation, but readers might jump out of the narrative when they see the "you" which could confuse them. You have to keep the reader in the story, as that central character. I chose it for that reason: I wanted to force my reader in the story and not let them come out. 2nd person was the only way to do this.

Like always, I'll let the story sit anywhere from a few days to a week before I reread it. I have ideas in my head, but it's always good to let a story sit. That way, I read it more as a reader and less like the person who wrote it. I'll be able to see what stands out, what works, and what just seems awkward.

Did I mention I'm really excited?

The Secrets of Mariko

by Elisabeth Bumiller

Another nonfiction book among the masses of novels I normally read. It's also a book I had to read for my Japanese Civilization class. As the tag line on the book says, it's "A year in the life of a Japanese woman and her family." The author basically held interviews and watched the family do their thing for an entire year then wrote a book about it. The good part of this book was that Bumiller didn't stop the interviews at just family members. She went to other people in the neighborhood, celebrities, politicians, and even a high ranking person in the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia (who have much more power than any American mafia). These parts were the most fascinating. I learned about how the political system truly works, not how they say it does. There was the complex and completely absurd education system, and how generally it seems Japanese are fine with giving up personal happiness if they feel it will benefit the group. They are an interesting people.

I didn't like the writing style of the author at all, and this greatly hurt the book. She's really a journalist, and her style shows it. If you don't like reading the short articles in the newspaper, you will want to kill yourself after reading 300 pages of that style. She explains people and things even though she has already done so (like Mr. Tanazaki, the unofficial mayor of Ichomachi, or how she has to explain what karaoke is. Twice!). For that, I really couldn't stand the book. And I was constantly angry at the Japanese, because they want to be happy, but refuse to change their lives to become happy! As interesting as parts were, the book was slow paced and I wanted to burn on multiple occasions.

2 stars (it gets 2 for the small amount of info I cared about).

Next: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

The Writing Environment

It's extremely important to know what kind of writing environment works for you. Whatever other writers might use to get the creative juices flowing might not work for you. If you need the commotion of people, a small coffee shop or café will work. JK Rowling wrote the entire Harry Potter series at the same café in her hometown. For others, reclusiveness is key. Stephen King keeps himself in his office until he gets the amount of words he wants down on his computer screen. Now of course you could think, "These people know what to do! I should follow in their example!" Don't do it! They've realized what it takes to write, and you do, too.

For me, I need to be sitting at a desk (I float between two homes in Columbus and my dorm room in Cincinnati), with a window nearby for the necessary creative daydreams (but not in front of me, that would cause too much distraction), my computer screen, a comfortable chair, and some nice electronic music playing. The noises are just as important as the set-up. If you like working in silence and you have a big family, don't work in the dining room. If you love the sound of music blaring (Stephen King and I both do), make sure you have a radio or use iTunes or Windows Media Player on your computer. Every time you sit to write, the first priority should be to immerse yourself in the writing environment. For me, I love the sounds of electronic music: synth, bass, and natural vocals with computer tampering (it sounds paradoxical, but it isn't). I can't have any of the other genres I like listening to. It just doesn't work for me. Figure out your personal writing environment. It will be very beneficial.

The End of NaNoWriMo (for me)

It's not the end of the month. There's still over a week left, and so the only way to say this is "I'm a quitter." I'm not finishing my novel (which is at ~23,000 words, and so at about page 80). But I have reasons for doing so, which I'm giving to you:

1. Forcing a person to sit down and write 1667 words a day constricts creativity. Since there is this huge deadline in such a short amount of time, I'm required to push out words faster than I can think of them. To the NaNoWriMo people this means that your work will be about quantity not quality. What this means to me is: "I'm not even allowed to think about my novel, I just have to write frantically and hope a story happens." I've determined that the way I write best is in sporadic chunks: a couple hundred words here, a maybe a thousand there if I'm really feeling the muse. Mostly, though, I find if I sit down and write a few hundred good words in an hour then I have accomplished something. I don't feel accomplished writing 2000 words that have no meaning to me.

2. There comes time in a person's life when he should write a novel. This is not that time for me. I'm in the midst of college, trying to hold onto life financially and mentally, and so I need to make smaller, more manageable goals. I'm pushing myself to focus on the short story now. In fact, one of the characters in the novel has turned himself into a short story. By asking myself to write a short story in two weeks is a much more attainable goal, especially when I have books to read, papers to write, and tests to study for.

3. There is a great deal to learn as a writer before attempting the novel. Maybe for some authors (Dan Brown perhaps) there was never that period of learning, but like my example author, that can be the quality of the writing suffers. There is structure to every novel (and a lack of structure is just as important as structure), a building of events, a creation of a cast, and I need to learn about this before writing a novel. What I know how to write is a short story (although how well I write them is something different). I plan in the future to read novels as a writer would: figuring out how the author made the book and why what (s)he did worked or didn't work. Does this zap creativity? No, if anything it will show me what works, and what rules I can break to create a whole new reading experience.

Maybe these aren't good reasons for quitting. A person could easily tell me, "These are just excuses so you don't have to push yourself." Well, person, to you they might be excuses, but to me, it's a matter of priorities, and I can always write a novel later, when I feel comfortable writing one, and using my own timeframe.

Misery

by Stephen King

This book was creepy. He never scares me, but boy is he creepy. It's also a short one, which is good, because his long books can sometimes be tedious to read and get boring every once in awhile, but this wasn't. It was a constant ride through creepiness, and he perpetuated my belief that living in Maine and Colorado is a bad idea.

Update:

I was rushed when I first posted this, so now I'm going to go into a little bit more detail (and give the next book on the list). So Misery was everything that I said in the last post, and it's everything I talk about in other Stephen King books I've read, but this one is different from Lisey's Story and The Green Mile. The first thing is that this book is about the interactions of basically two characters: Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes. There are other Stephen King books with this many, or fewer, main characters, but I haven't read them. It was very interesting because King captured more of each character so that the reader fully understood everything. By the end of the book, I was able to predict what could happen just by the descriptions of how the character was acting, and while that could make a book bad, this only made me love the book even more.

I do have to say that King did make the villain (Annie Wilkes) very 2-dimensional in a cheap 3-dimensional way. She was your stereotypical crazy person, and he failed to show that these people (in Annie's case it appeared to be Psychotic Bipolar 1 Disorder) do have relatively normal states, which were completely absent from the book form. She was either manic or depressed, but rarely was Annie in Annie's state, and his history of her made it seem like she had been rocketing back and forth for years like this, which would completely drain her or make her commit suicide. So I do feel that King, in an attempt to make the story more frightening, denied a character her humanity.

In terms of entertainment: 4 stars. In terms of quality of writing: 3 stars.

Next is a non-fictional book called The Secrets of Mariko about a journalist living with a Japanese family for a year.

13,000 words in NaNoWriMo

I'm ahead of schedule by almost a day, and I am very proud of what I'm writing, despite that it's only a first draft, and this post is mostly about why I am happy with it.

First, I feel like I know my characters which has never been a problem with my short stories, but always an issue with my novels. For one character, I threw in bits and pieces of myself, and for the protagonist I made sure he was really pushing for a theme that is appearing in my novel. For the first time in an attempt at a novel, I care about my characters and hope the best happens, but I know that might not happen (I've read that all good stories kill off at least one character we care about).

The story is also moving in a way I have never seen myself go before. It means I've grown as a writer since this time last year. Last year, I wrote my novel in chunks of scenes, only bringing in the parts I thought people would want to read, and the rest was boring trash. This year I've decided to include the boring trash, because I've realized that you can't have scenes unless the characters get to them, and last year characters were magically appearing where they needed to be and there were random jumps in time, leaving the whole novel scattered. It was very bad, but this year I'm writing about the character showing up at the doorstep to his girlfriend's apartment, and I show the drunken father walking in with a prostitute instead of getting right to the action, because action is overwhelming if that's all there is. You need some time to cool down or else the reader will feel like their caught in a vortex and put the book down and need a tylenol for the headache you've given them.