Genres Revisited: What Genre Do I Write?

So what genre would you assign
to this book?  Oh, I know!
It has to be about an
exterminator named
Ki'shto'ba who labors at
destroying termite colonies
 by abducting their Queens! 
Right?!

What genre is this?

Hmm ... hard to tell from the cover.

In fact, I call it speculative

literary science fiction, future 

history, psychological fiction, plus a 

rumination on future religions.
With a provocative theme and

 great characters-- 

don't forget that!

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March 2-7, 2015

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Jane Dougherty recently wrote a blog post entitled Does Literary Have to Mean Dull and Boring?  She defines literary fiction as "something that could never be accused of being genre fiction."  She goes on to say, "since authors are obliged to fit their work into a genre when pitching it to publishers and agents, or just to sell it on Amazon," anything that didn't fit in a genre was disqualified as poor literary production, in effect. "In the label 'genre' writing there is an implicit sneer," she says.  She mentions "magical realism," saying, "our magical realism is just plain fantasy (I wrote that with a sneer)."

       In her final paragraph she says, "Why can't we go back to the good old days when there were just books and children's books?  I like to think I write books.  I don't like to think that they are so similar to other people's books that there is a handy tag for them."

       I couldn't agree more, Jane!  And I want to elaborate on this idea a bit.  I originally planned to become a college professor of English literature, so I spent the early part of my career reading "literary" fiction.  Frankly, I didn't even know that was what I was reading -- books by Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, James Joyce, William Faulkner -- they were all "just books."  I daresay those authors are all considered writers of literary fiction.  But they are definitely not boring, for starters!  Lately, I've read several books that are "literary" -- The Great Gatsby, for one, and a recent book by Simon Gough (a grandnephew of Robert Graves) entitled The White Goddess, in which Graves is a main character. (The links take you to my reviews of these books.) Boring? Not on your life!  (Parenthetically, I should point out again that I consider all significant books to contain elements of fantasy -- see my post Defining Fantasy According to TermiteWriter.  To impart a shiver of wonder can only enrich any "genre.")

       In midlife I discovered Tolkien (is he literary enough for you?) and I started to write somewhat similar fantasy.  I also started to read a lot of fantasy and finally got into science fiction.  It never occurred to me that I was somehow betraying my educational background -- that I had sunk low in matters of taste.  I was just looking for good books and I kept the same standards.  Thus, although I read a good deal of Marion Zimmer Bradley, I considered her a pretty pedestrian writer.  But then there is Ursula K. LeGuin, who is one of the most skillful writers around.  And there  was C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams (one of the Inklings)  and other older writers like E.R. Eddison (The Worm Ourobouros et al.) and William Morris (The Well at the World's End) and ... well, I could go on and on.  They definitely cross genre lines and nobody seems to condemn them for it.
       As for "magical realism," I've only read one example -- Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits.  It's full of fantastical elements, of course, but it's also very dark and not particularly comfortable to read.  It's never boring, though.  I would say, if having seriousness of purpose makes a book boring for you, well, then most literary fiction would fall in that category.  And most of my books have a serious purpose, even the termite epic, so I guess I have the only literary termite people in existence!

       When I started to write again in 2000, it never occurred to me to worry about the genre I was writing.  I didn't realize at that time that I was supposed to fit my fiction into a category.  I was just trying to write exciting and fascinating books. I happened to enjoy both science fiction and fantasy, and obviously a tale laid in the 30th century with extraterrestrials who are giant intelligent termites cast The Termite Queen in the SF mold.  But it also includes the tale of Kaitrin Oliva and her enigmatic lover.  One early reviewer called my works literary science fiction and stated that they reminded him of Mary Doria Russell (I see Wikipedia calls her a writer of "speculative fiction" novels -- I presume that designation elicits more respect.)

       I was always taught not to write in cliches, so why in the world would I want to pump out books that were carbon copies of other people's books?  My aim was never to get rich selling millions of books to thoughtless readers looking only for sensation or escape -- I wanted to attract some attention for my ideas and gain some respect and a following.  Those are still my goals.  I wouldn't even know how to write a stereotypical vampire romance or a nasty zombie tale or a cliched space opera or one of these sword-and-sorcery Tolkien rip-offs.  If I tried, the characters would soon develop all kinds of psychological complexities and gain a back story to explain it, and probably the outcome of the whole thing would be tragic.  Even my termite characters fit that picture.  It's just the way I write, and I have no intention of changing.

If you're interested, I addressed this genre question before, way back in 2012, from a slightly different perspective in a blog piece called What Genre Do I Write and Whom Do I Write For?

What Has TermiteWriter Been Up To Lately?

       Neglecting her termites, that's what!

Neglecting her blogs, too, but that's less important

 than neglecting her termites!

 

       So why have I been so shiftless lately?  It's not the holidays, because I don't do much for Christmas.  It's my WIP, The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars.  I may have mentioned before that I have a beta reader for this humongous piece, and he is totally involved -- he loves the opus and keeps wanting more of it!  This has impelled me to work diligently to get parts of it ready to send to him. 

I may not draw very well,
but this really does capture
what the Captain looks like.
 

       I'm supposed to be shortening it (Hah! Famous last words!)  Actually, mostly I'm just reading it.  It's been a long time since I went through it and I've become completely absorbed, and the farther I get into it, the more intense and compelling it becomes.   On the bright side, I've not added anything to it and I actually have shortened it a little, but only by way of cutting words like unnecessary "that," and "just" and "now" (which I overuse).  I do occasionally condense a paragraph or cut a sentence, but those emendations are like grains of sand plucked away from a beach. 

       I honestly think I could shorten it more drastically, but I get caught up in the story and the flow of the dialogue (the piece is heavy on dialogue, like all my writings), and I never can achieve any distance.  Maybe after I  finish this pass-through, I can manage a more objective look.

       Another thing that the story requires is new chapterization and that I'm managing to do.  Since the book is cast as a biography, I began by heading the chapters with nothing but dates and places.   This makes it impossible to know what's going on by looking through the ToC, so I've never been able to find anything in the story.  The chapters were also too long, so I'm chopping them into shorter chunks and adding chapter titles.  I like books with chapter titles.  I think they can draw a reader in.  For example, here are the titles of the first ten chapters of The Valley of Thorns (v.3 of The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head):

 

The Marchers Muster before the Hot Gate. 11

The Hosts March South. 22

The Battle of Wei’loi’bao’cha. 32

The Aftermath of the Battle. 4

Peace Negotiations. 5

The Return of the Envoy. 5

The Evacuation of Wei’loi’bao’cha. 7

The Bite of the Tooth77

The Horn Is Broken

Mourning

 

       Now doesn't that list make you interested in reading the book so you can learn what all those intriguing titles imply?

       As I add chapter titles to MWFB, I'm also retaining the dates covered in the chapters, since it is a biography.  All this is taking some time, but it will make further revision easier.  I'm still not saying I'll ever be able to publish it because it is in fact the quintessential million-word novel -- all one humongous story.  The Termite Queen was too long for one volume, but it fit nicely into two.  MWFB will need maybe five and that's just for the part I've completed -- it isn't finished, you know.  It can't be a series in the traditional sense, which implies that each volume stands alone.  This is all one long story, just like people's lives are one long story.  You need the contents of v.1 to prepare you for v.2 and v.3, just as you need to know what happens in a man's childhood to help you understand his actions at the ages of 30 and 50.

       Just the same, I'm sorely tempted to publish the first volume, which I call Eagle Ascendant.  I takes Capt. Robbin Nikalishin to age 31 and drops him at a huge cliffhanger.  It would be a long book in itself -- at the moment it's 171,000 words.  But my beta reader was crazy about it and said he didn't think I should lose a word.  So what's to do?  Will anybody else be similarly impressed?  Only the space gods know!  If readers did take to it, it would be worthwhile plowing ahead with the project.

 

       So that's why I've been neglecting my poor little termites!  But they are still there, demanding attention!  Why don't you all go out and help keep them content while I cook this big pudding that is The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars?  You can find Ki'shto'ba and its cohorts at Amazon or at Smashwords.

 

       A footnote on the genre of Man Who Found Birds:  I almost have to call it a piece of literary fiction.  It just happens to be laid in 28th century and to involve space travel and future history, but what it really deals with is the human spirit, with all its triumphs and all its failings.  Really, all my books, including the ones inhabited by extraterrestrial termites, deal with that subject.  Mythmaker Precept No.  17: 

There are creatures on this planet [amended later to in the universe]

 who speak, form symbols, and share emotions;

these may be called human.

 

 

  9

What Genre Do I Write, and Whom Do I Write For?

       A couple of things lately have set me thinking about these questions.  First, I joined WANAtribe (a new social network for writers, artists, and other creative people).  Naturally, I signed up for the Science Fiction/Fantasy/Steampunk tribe, and also for Science Fiction Romance and for Women's Fiction (since I've been trying to nudge female readers into trying my ""Termite Queen").  One of the discussion groups in the SF/F group was "What genre do you write?"  And I found my material doesn't fit cleanly anywhere.
       Here's what I wrote:  "I write a mixed genre, but some have called what I write literary science fiction, because that's my style. It's future history, laid in the 30th century following a melt-down and resurgence of civilization. My novel "The Termite Queen" has a significant love story, so I've joined the SFR tribe. And it has a first contact with an extraterrestrial intelligent lifeform evolved from termites. It's an off-world adventure and a psychological investigation. And it makes use of conlangs -- constructed languages. So how would you define what I write? And oh, yes, I'm getting ready to publish a retelling of Greek myth as it would take place among my termite people!"
       Now that may be confusing, but that's OK, because each writer needs to find her or his own voice.  "Termite Queen" has to be called science fiction because it has all the trappings of the genre -- laid in a futuristic setting, with interstellar travel, established relationships with intelligent extraterrestrial species, first contacts, off-world adventure -- the works.  But all that merely provides a milieu for a story with a universal impact, with psychological development and literary and mythic elements.  The love story that provides the framework for the plot could have taken place in any time and among any intelligent species that shares human characteristics.  The closest of any of my books to traditional SF is the novella "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder," and even that is more a psychological adventure than an action tale. ("Monster" is a good place to begin if you want to try my books, by the way.)   And then of course there is "The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head," which shares an off-world setting with parts of TQ but can't be classified as anything but fantasy, since the action takes place entirely in an imaginary world and the cast of characters consists amost entirely of members of an alien intelligent species.
       So that brings up a question put to me by a friend the other day:  For whom do I write?  Who are my readers?  Who do I expect will be attracted to my books?
       I told this friend that fundamentally I wrote "Termite Queen" for myself.  I personally love the book, although I have no trouble acknowledging that it's too long.  So I guess I wrote it for other people who think like I do, who like the same kinds of things that I like, and whose educational background induced a love of poetry, symbolism, mythic implications, and psychological conflicts.  I'm convinced I'm not the only person out there who likes that sort of thing.  I may never acquire a huge following for TQ because it doesn't target a popular fanbase; I will never write about zombies, vampires, or werewolves -- that's just not my thing -- and I will never write steampunk.   I'm not denigrating those genres; I don't think any book should be belittled for being part of a particular genre.  It's the quality of the plot concept, the characters, and the writing that makes a book appealing and successful, not the framework in which it is couched.
       And I should perhaps add -- "The Termite Queen" is not a retelling of any myth or any other work of literature.   The series "Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head" is just that -- it retells some wonderful ancient Earth Tales in the setting of the termite culture.  But all that is still to come ...