Genre? We Don't Need No Stinking Genre, by Josh Stallings

Q: Okay, we write about crime, but if you had to dip a toe into another genre, which would you add to the mix, and why?

A: This is a wonderful question in that it runs my mind down multiple tracks of thought. I call myself a crime writer, and yet I’m not sure I believe in genre except as a way to organize bookstore shelves. 

Gary Phillips One-Shot Harry is clearly a crime book, and it is equally a historical novel about race, civil rights, politics and the police in 1963 Los Angeles. It is also a fine and wonderful novel. 

Naomi Hirahara’s Clark and Division is crime fiction, and it is a historical novel depicting Japanese Americans who, when released from mass incarceration were sent to live in Chicago. It can be read and enjoyed as a mystery, but the facts and history lessons buried in it are unavoidable. And this is where genre lets us down, no good book is just one thing, or even two for that matter. 

Is Steinbeck’s reworking of Arthurian legends in Tortilla Flat a crime novel? Danny and his mates commit crimes, they are in and out of jail. The story without the writer’s voice could be noir. Crime novel or character study or…?

  

Is To Kill A Mocking Bird a crime novel, legal thriller, or a coming of age novel? It has elements of all of these, as does any great book regardless of the genre we place it in.

SUB GENRES:

Inside crime writing we have Traditional, Hard Boiled, Noir, Cozy, Detective, Police Procedural, Spy, Heist, etc…. That’s before we get to thrillers and all its hyphenates. (I’m sure I’ve left many out.) 

I think of crime fiction like the blues. John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, BB King, and Mississippi John Hurt all work within the same 12 bars, 3 chords, 6 notes constraint. And yet they each express their own voice inside it. Chicago Blues and Delta Blues have less in common than Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler yet they are in the same section of iTunes. And even with the simplicity of the blues, these artists spent their lives exploring those 12 bars. 

So far everything I’ve written fits into crime fiction, but I have danced in multiple sub-genres. The Moses McGuire trilogy was spot on hard boiled. Then I wrote a memoir. Then a disco heist novel. 

With Tricky I wanted to write about a good cop like my grand father had been. I also needed to speak to how intellectually disabled people are treated by the police. Katrina Niidas Holm at Mystery Scene Magazine wrote, “Stallings manages to entertain while advocating for criminal justice reform and calling out unexamined societal biases.” Which sounds like a social justice crime novel, yet it is categorized as a police procedural.

I start every new book with a wisp of an idea so ephemeral that anything as solid as genre would blow it away. This is totally true, until it isn’t. Coming off the Moses books I was beat. Looking for a new idea I thought about writing a story harkening back to my misspent youth as a glitter kid in the ‘70s. The words, “Disco Heist” came to me. Hadn’t a clue what it meant except that heist was a sub genre. Excluding Young Americans, I wait until the book is done and with the help of my agent and editor we discover a marketing approach, part of that will be discovering the best genre to place it in. 

And there it is, I just stumbled onto why I don’t think of genre when working; trying to decide how to sell a car before you even know if will have wheels or wings, or could be a boat, doesn’t help me as a writer. (Side note, genre also doesn’t help me as a reader.)

Back to the question, are their other genres I might try out? Sure. I am enamored with Emily St. John Mandel’s work. I would love to write a post-apocalyptic tale like her Station Eleven. The way she drifts through time and place with a powerful emotional through line is stunning. I’ve also had a western kicking around my head for a while… We’ll have to see if either of these climb their way to the top of my to-be-written pile.

My current work in progress may not have any crime in it. I pitched my agent a rough outline. Added, “Bad news, it may not be crime fiction.” She told me it didn’t matter, just pour my heart into it. And that’s what I’ll do. Pour my heart on the page and let marketing figure out this genre deal.

Climbing the Unclimbable by Josh Stallings

 This week’s question was about the publishing business, how it’s changed since your first release, where did we see it would be in the next ten years. Luckily writers smarter than me have spoken eloquently to this earlier in the week. 

I’m going to share with you how the publishing industry effects my work and what I’ve done to survive and maybe even thrive. 

New Writer: How do you write a novel?

Me: I don’t know. I can’t. It is an impossible task.

New Writer: No. I meant what software do you use?

Me: Started with MS Word. Moved to Nisus, now I use Scrivener. None have made it any more possible to write a novel. Fact is the only software necessary is between your ears and still it is an impossible task.

(New Writer walks away shaking his head at my mad gibberish.) 

I have five published novels, been up for some awards, gotten some wonderful reviews. And none of that makes the task any easier. Every novel is a new journey with all new pitfalls and discoveries. 

Right now my sixth novel is still a MS (manuscript) out on submission - meaning my agent is shopping it to editors at publishing houses. The upside, an absolute dream list of editors asked to read it. Editors who have worked with some of my favorite writers. Downside: at this moment in publishing history a few factors like a world wide pandemic, fears of inflation / recession, employees reassessing career goals and leaving, have all built up to leave things a bit higgledy piggledy, in an end of days kinda way. One of the results is, it’s taking longer than usual for editors to get to reading new books. No fault of theirs. These are tough days, and nights for all.

   

This is the best book I have written, bigger and stronger in many ways. Deep in some hidden place I had hoped we’d send it out and a few weeks later I’d be popping the Martinelli's sparkling cider to celebrate a sale. 

I try to not take the silence personally. But it effects me personally. What I need to be doing is working on my next book. It was meant to be a sequel to the one we haven’t heard back about, so that’s out. I need a new idea. Yet every idea is met by self doubt screaming “you aren’t good enough to write that book.” It takes massive hubris to stare at a blank page and say, “Oh yeah I can build a world here and people it with compelling characters. No problemo.” And while I wait to hear back I find myself running short on hubris.

Two sides of the same mad man.

And then I’m talking to my friend Chantelle, she acquired and edited my last book, Tricky. I float two or three ideas past her. I have a basic idea that I keep trying to plug into books that I think will sell better. “Instead of LA, it is LA but post apocalyptic LA vegans vs carnivores… Or, it’s about my father but instead of an artist in the rainforest, he’s a talking Raccoon…. Or, it’s all those things and it takes place in France…”

Chantelle says nothing but I can hear these pitches sinking over the phone. I don’t mind, none were good enough to fight for. After I’m done making a fool of myself, she said something like, “The best books come from the author’s original point of inspiration. Maybe you should go back to your original idea. Maybe write that. Write the thing you wanted to write.” 

Damned if Chantelle wasn’t right. 

I sat down the next day and the story flowed out. I have stridently said I don’t work from an outline. I will have to amend that to I don’t work from an outline, unless I do. This thing came flying out, beginning middle and end. Lots to flesh out as I write it, but I can see the structure clearly. And for once I know what the book is about. Good news is my agent and a few of my most trusted confidants agree I’m onto something good.

Today I’ll let inspiration and intuition guide my hand. There is no guarantee of tomorrow so I must type as if these are my last words. Write as fiercely honest as I am capable. And tell my inner critic to fuck the hell off. 

 

I’m three chapters in now. The book is flowing. I feel electric. And I know I am heading for that dreadful moment where I realize I’m not up to writing the book I see in my head. The moment where I see my complete failure crashing down around me. Been there before. Every book has that moment inherent in the journey. I just push through it.

Last night I was reading John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley In Search of America. In a passage where he’s studying a map getting ready for this epic journey he realizes he’s taken on too much, it will be too long, too difficult…

“How in hell I’d got myself mixed up in a project that couldn’t be carried out. It was like starting to write a novel. When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing.”

If Steinbeck could eliminate the possibility of ever finishing and still keep typing, then so can I. So can you. The wall only beats us if we stop running our forehead into it.

The future of publishing is yet to be written. But I know what I’ll be doing… typing out my truth best I can. Climbing unclimbable mountains one word at a time.  

***

Photos (my face) by Barry Samson, (type Writer) by Nino Gabaldon

An Eye for an Eye, A Quote for a Quote

What's the best quote you've heard about writing and why do you like it?

by Paul D. Marks

Well, bringing up the rear here on a Friday, let’s see what I can come up with:
I think I’d have to say I have two favorite quotes about writing.

The first is by William Goldman, screenwriter extraordinaire, and is about screenwriting, but I think it can apply to novel and short story writing as well:

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess—and, if you're lucky, an educated one.
―William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade

Many people have heard this quote, but of course they forget everything he said except for the first three words. They’ve been interpreted different ways, so I’ll put my own spin on them. And that is that everybody has a different idea about what works and what doesn’t. One hears often that agents or editors will say don’t have a prologue. Then you see books with prologues. Don’t use flashbacks. There was a producer who was famous for saying that if he saw ellipses in scripts he’d close it immediately. So F all of them. And do what works for your story. A prologue might turn some people off, but it might work for others. The other thing is, you send out a story/novel and are “lucky” enough to get notes back with your rejection, so you change the story to fit those notes. You send it out to someone else and they have notes that counteract the first person’s notes. So write it your way. You can’t please everybody and sometimes it seems you can’t please anybody.

My other favorite writing quote would be this from Jules Renard: “Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.”

I mean be honest, haven’t you felt this many times? We are the artist, we have the artist’s vision and true, sometimes it’s messy, but sometimes it’s also more real, more authentic (to use a hackneyed phrase). A lot of times editors will want to clean up your manuscript to the point of taking your voice out of it. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re not. But unless they’re paying you don’t pay attention because the next person might not like their suggestions. When I was doing script doctoring I’d often get a writer’s draft of a script. Then besides tightening, which is always a good thing, there would be notes or conversations with directors, producers, etc., about how they wanted to change it. And often, they would, of course, want more sex and violence, yes it’s a cliché but it’s true. But also often they would tear the heart out of it. Whatever good things were in the writer’s draft they’d want to trash. And often the writer’s draft, while needing some work was better than the final draft, whether it was my draft or another person who came on to rewrite after me. I was friends with a fairly well known writer-director. And I remember reading the first draft of one of his early scripts. And it was pretty good. And then the studio and a big name producer got involved and they made changes to his script and diluted it to the point where it was mediocre at best. Maybe it was more commercial, and it did get made. But I don’t think it was a better script. And I don’t think it did particularly well at the box office.

Some other quotes I like:

The next two are on the same page, so to speak:

“Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.”―Gene Fowler

And:

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”―Red Smith

Having been around the block a time or two, as a writer and a lecturer on writing, I constantly come across people who want to write, who have an idea and want someone to help finish it, gratis, of course, because “it will be the biggest money maker in the history of all time.” Lucas and Spielberg and Grisham and J.K. Rowling will be jealous. But more often than not they don’t put in the time and effort, blood, sweat and tears required because to do that is to do metaphorically what these two quotes suggest: stare at a blank piece of paper (computer screen) and open up a vein until the blood starts dripping off your forehead. People think it’s easy to write. Because they don’t know how hard it is and they don’t really want to know.

And lastly:

“The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.”―John Steinbeck

I think this one speaks for itself. And with the book and publishing worlds in the turmoil they’re in today, this quote is more prescient than ever. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the track to try to earn a steady living.