Not Genre, Just a Good Book

 When I realized it is not genre but the story that mattered I could start writing again. What started me learning this little fact was Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Is it a Western or a historical novel of a very strange sort or an allegory - or does it even matter?  Michael Chabon and Colson Whitehead and Margaret Whitehead also showed me the senselessness of genre.

Now this showed up ion my email for LitHub, a fellow genre skeptic, The Perks of Reading Across Genre as Both Bookseller and Writer :

Here’s the thing: they don’t say “I’m in the mood for X kind of books.” They say “I only like X kind of books.” What I can’t fathom is why people would limit themselves. Genre can arguably be categorized by a collection of tropes and settings, but the stories within each genre are infinite in the way they may reach a reader.

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What I know for sure about writing is that you can’t write well if you don’t read, and read a lot of different things. While I was writing my novel The World Gives Way, which features an apocalypse, I read a lot of fiction that felt like direct inspiration: Station Eleven, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Memory Police, On the Beach. These books helped me get in the right headspace to imagine a world on the brink of collapse. They also offered an escape, enriched my life, and did all the other things good books do, which is probably more important than mining texts for story ideas.

But reading books that were similar to my story was only part of the equation. Any time I got seriously blocked, I turned to books that were seemingly the opposite of my own work. When I had plot issues during my first draft, I turned to Invisible Cities, which is a book full of prose poems and not much in the way of straightforward plot. Though The World Gives Way is fairly exterior and the characters are active, the interiority of To the Lighthouse helped me work through my characters’ psychology. Additionally, the inert characters of Samuel Beckett gave me the right existential mood.

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The problem, of course, is that there are no major or minor leagues between genres. Octavia Butler can and should be spoken of with the same reverence as Virginia Woolf. They are very different writers, but both are masters of their craft.

Once upon a time I worked in a restaurant with a waiter who was the first gay man I ever met. He got in  a rant about not being put in a pigeonhole. I didn't want to be pigeonholed either so I have remembered his lecture long after I have forgotten his name. And if we do not want to be pigeonholed as person, why should we want our writing - certainly an expression of our personas - to be pigeonholed? 

And then I ran across this, On Deciding to Tell My Story in a Novel Instead of a Memoir, on LitHub:

I’m still drawn to memoir and essays and hope someday to write a collection about my parents and their lineage, to write about the cities where we lived as a family, how moving affected all of us in our own ways. Maybe it’s that in relation to telling a family history, I feel more appropriate writing nonfiction, and when I’m drumming up the chaotic and challenging days of my youth and adolescence, I’m better off fictionalizing.  Maybe the important part is that I too continue to shift forward and keep writing, that I get to decide what I want to write and how.

No one else will, or can, care about your work as much as you. You get to decide the way each letter falls on the page. You get to decide when to shift forward. With each setback comes a bigger propel forward; it just takes time. We must be excited by the opportunities, by the grace of writing, by the gifts we have been given.

And consider this:

JC: You’ve described yourself as having “eclectic literary interests including sci-fi poetry, graphic novels, speculative fiction, medical humanities, the African diasporic experience, and works by female authors in genres such as horror, western, Afrofuturism, and mystery.” Which authors are the top influencers of your work by genre? Realism? Mystery? Fable/myth? Horror (zombies)? Speculative fiction? Satire? Graphic novels?

NN: This is a tough one since my reading habits have forever been eclectic. I will now throw out a very small handful of names (many with stories I teach in my classes) and hope that folks understand that this list is neither definitive nor exhaustive.

Realism: What is real these days anyway? We were just dealing with murder hornets!! But here [it] goes—Karen Russell, Yaa Gyasi, Alexia Arthurs, Lee K. Abbott, Kevin Brockmeier, Jennifer Egan, Samantha Hunt, Ian McEwan.

Fable/Myth: Nalo Hopkinson, Carmen Maria Machado, Diane Cook, Angela Carter.

Mystery: Gillian Flynn, Daniel Woodrell, Edgar Allen Poe.

Horror: Stephen King, Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Tananarive Due, Max Brooks.

Satire: David Sedaris, Trevor Noah and his kind, aka my fave observational humor comedians turned book writers. Yvonne Orji’s new book will probably be fire.

Graphic Novels: Marjane Satrapi, Marguerite Abouet, Alison Bechdel, and all the comic book authors whose works I binge-read like one tome including Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, and EVERYTHING by Brian K. Vaughan.

Speculative Fiction: Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr., Alice Sola Kim, Shelly Oria, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Sam J. Miller, and so many more works from the Golden Age onward. I lived in those books. 

Nana Nkweti on the Impact of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Complexities of Multicultural Identity