Q: If you write in an alternate non-mystery genre, which one - and why? If you don't, which genre would you most like to write in, and what attracts you to it?
“If you think of your own life, there’s no one genre it fits into. I was a victim of crime but I wouldn’t shelve my life into crime fiction.” - Chris Whitaker, at Aspen Idea Festival.
https://youtu.be/v71dcIMQm0M?si=oEtUlSuYnjZQKOh4
“Fuck genre.” - Josh Stallings
Yes, Chris Whitaker says it much more eloquently than me, but the sentiment stands. In that same interview he speaks about working in a library when We Begin at the End came out. He tried placing it in the crime fiction section and it didn’t do well. Placing it in general fiction it got ten times the notice. It was a tiny sample study, anecdotal at best but it feels accurate. As readers most of us read widely. But as a marketing concept genre has become necessary if we want to sell a book.
I worked in movie marketing and can remember when the comparison game became necessary to pitch screenplays — It’s Back to the Future meets Beverly Hills Cop with a dash of Star Wars — and comps have taken over in publishing. Publishers Weekly often puts out “what’s hot now” articles, a list of titles yours should be like if you want to sell them — “It’s S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed if it was written by Anthony S. Fauci.”
Add to the comps game “the elevator pitch,” distill your novel into a compelling exciting multi-layered thirty second synopsis. We have pitch sessions and pitch wars going on at most every writer’s conference where you get a few minutes to sell yourself to agents and book editors. The ability to pitch has as much to do with writing as chopping wood has to do with rebuilding a carburetor. Being able to split a log with one strike of the axe isn’t predictive of being good at the fiddly work of fixing a carb.
Yes there are folks who are great at both. And like songs there are great books that have fantastic one line hooks. But these aren’t necessarily must haves for success. Jenna Bush Hager calls Whitaker’s All the Colors of the Dark genre bending, or blending. She is a damn smart reader and thinker and she also said Whitaker is her favorite author. I suspect she would agree that genre isn’t helping readers find good reads any more, if it ever did.
In delivering a smashing pitch, writers are being asked to deliver the ad line and shape of the sales campaign, often for a book we haven’t finished yet. Earlier in the Aspen Idea Festival interview Whitaker said he doesn’t think about the genre for his book while writing it.
To need a marketing strategy before writing or reading a manuscript is truly the tail wagging the dog. Yes that’s a cliche, but so is the elevator speech and most of the genre tropes.
I love genre fiction. Some of my favorite authors only write crime fiction. James Crumley could have been pitched as Hunter S. Thompson meets Raymond Chandler in the back woods of Montana. A reviewer of my Beautiful Naked & Dead said, “Josh Stallings writes like he is the bastard child of James Crumley and Andrew Vachss.”
I love non-genre fiction. Some of my favorite authors write widely in and out of genre. See Charlie Huston. Or Margaret Atwood, listed as Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, pépiniériste (nurseryman, or person) and inventor. If a writer survives long enough they become a genre unto themselves. Like Margaret Atwood, John Steinbeck’s books run the gamut. With both of these writers their name is the genre.
TRUE CONFESSION: If I was better at pitching. If I knew how to write high concept novels. If my first books had been blockbusters. I might be a huge fan of categorizing books into sub-sub-genres.
Back to Chris Whitaker. We Begin at the End is one of my all time favorite books. With Duchess Day Radley, a thirteen-year-old self-proclaimed outlaw Whitaker created a character that will live in my head forever.
Only a third of the way through his latest book, All the Colors of the Dark I can already say Whitaker is surpassing his high benchmark. A girl named Saint and a boy named Patch feel like family I didn’t know I had.
Whitaker’s prose has slammed into a higher gear…
“It was not until midnight broke that she crossed daggers of nettles and a well of water that basined between mossed rock and inched up her numbed feet that she saw it.”
This description of a sheriff leading youth through a crowd, slays me. “Nix seared them a path with his badge.” Or this, “Another shack to the left, rotting, its frame exposed like charred ribs.” This, “At the first fall of rain she looked through a canopy that stammered light as wind parted it.” Stammered light, fuck that’s good. Reminds me of Jamie Mason’s very personal style.
As good as Whitaker’s descriptions are, where he truly shines is his heart, and his deep understanding of us frail and tough, fragile and unbreakable humans.
“She smelled faintly of Sweet Honesty and decay.”
“He wondered just how tough it was to be a parent, and if at times all poor kids were some kind of well-intentioned regret.”
“Two people are less lost than one.”
Patch searching reports of missing persons notices….
“The girls outnumbered the boys fifty to one. They varied in appearance but were one and the same. Young. Mostly too young to realize they were birthmarked with targets that only boldened with time, invisible to begin with, taking shape through formative years and burning red hot through puberty and into their teens.”
— All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker
Circling back to the question what genre would I choose to write in? My writing life has been leading me down a broken road into a country that is both familiar and entirely unknown. As I write a new manuscript I see that genre gave me structure to hang my tales on until I found the ability to soar tether free. I hope when this next work is done I will have torn away the safety nets genre offered me. Mostly I want to surprise myself, and hopefully you in the process.
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