Category: Musings

Musings

Weekly Musings: Whose Genre Is It Anyway?

DH Hanni

What is a genre? A genre is category, type, or class of literature. Sounds simple enough but in reality is complicated and can be confusing for the writer and, perhaps, even for the reader.

Classifying genres starts out simply enough: Fiction and Nonfiction.

Within fiction, the broad categories are:

Drama
Tragedy
Comedy
Tragicomedy

Ahhh, but let’s add more like it was seven-layer dip.

Fiction has the following sub-genres:

Adventure
Romance
Crime
Mystery
Fantasy
Fiction Narrative
Fiction in Verse
Historical Fiction
Horror
Humor
Poetry
Realistic Fiction
Literary Fiction
Science Fiction
Westerns

But wait! There’s more! Let’s get more sub-sub genres within fiction.

This is an extremely small list:

Absurdist
Men’s Adventure
Children’s Literature
Romantic Comedy
Parody
Black Comedy
Experimental
Erotica
Historical
Historical Romance
Regency Romance
Literary
Metafiction
Philosophical
Political Satire
Pulp
Religious
Family Saga
Speculative
Steampunk
Cyberpunk
Dystopian
Alternative History
Paranormal
Monster Literature
Supernatural
Comic Fantasy
Dark Fantasy
High Fantasy
Historical Fantasy
Low Fantasy
Urban Fantasy
Crime
Detective
Chick-Lit
Melodrama
Legal Thriller
Medical Thriller
Political Thriller

You get the idea. And this isn’t including works that borrow from multiple genres.

Within nonfiction, the broad categories are:

Biography/Autobiography
Essay
Speech
Textbooks

And here comes the sub-genres within nonfiction:

Creative nonfiction
Memoir
Diaries and Journals
History
Letters
Religious text

Clearly, nonfiction is less taxing to classify.

As readers, we tend to gravitate towards one type of book over another, one author over another. But what happens when your favorite author wants to expand and try a different genre out? One of my favorite authors, Ken Follett, has written a nonfiction book On Wings of Eagles about Ross Perot’s involvement in retrieving two of his employees who had been falsely arrested during a revolution in Tehran, Iran back in the late 1970s. Follett is most well-known for historical fiction set during WWII and the Middle Ages but has written more modern novels such as Paper Money (written under a pseudonym in the 1970s) and The Hammer of Eden. Naturally when an author becomes extremely well-known, their publisher isn’t as concerned about how to market the book. All they have to say is ‘New book from Big Famous Author XYZ’ and fans will buy it.

Our reasons are as varied as the types of books available and book publishers know this. Genre classifications allow book publishers to know how to market a book to the correct audience.

But what about books that cross genres? A book that spans several generations, for example. Say it starts off during the American Revolution and ends with the family as it is today. Is that considered historical fiction or just general fiction? Is it a percentage of the content of the book that determines the dominate genre? The job of making this determination is usually left to the marketing department of a book publishing company however, if you are self-publishing, you generally have a good idea what category your work falls into.

So do genre classifications help or hinder a writer’s creativity? Worrying about what neat little box one’s work falls into while writing it can only hinder. And bring up the dreaded writers gremlin salivating on your shoulder as it peers down on your work, ready to pick the story apart. Let the words, characters, settings, and plots flow. Get it down onto paper or computer screen and don’t worry about its box until the time comes to publish it.

I personally am interested in writing historical fiction; it’s what I love to read the most and I have a lot of fun doing the research. But a lot of story ideas I’ve jotted down aren’t historical fiction. I love to read different types of books and authors, so why should I limit myself to one particular genre? The characters drive the piece not sitting around fretting about what genre the story fits.

Musings

Weekly Musing: New Kid on the (Writer’s) Block

DH Hanni

Writer’s block. A thing much lamented by virtually every writer of anything ever. But I personally don’t believe in it so hear me out. Perhaps what I have experienced so far would be defined as writer’s block. That’s not to say I haven’t experienced periods of being stuck or overwhelmed or underwhelmed by something I’m writing, I do. In fact, when trying to choose a topic of this week’s Weekly Musing, I found myself at a lost. I have a list of topics but none of them jumped out at me screaming ‘It’s my turn! Pick me, pick me!’ Alas, the topic of writer’s block bubbled to the surface due in part to the tremendous amount of reading I’ve been doing of late rather than actual writing.

But I was not experiencing writer’s block, at least not in my interpretation.

I define writer’s block as the complete and utterly inability to write anything. Surely a writer has something to say that day, week, or month. It may not be very good or even comprehensible but at least something can be written down. One isn’t committed to the first thing slapped onto paper or hammered out on a keyboard. That’s what revision and editing are for; a chance to rework the miserable dribble that dropped out of your mind. To experience that moment of inspiration and say ‘This is what I meant to say all along but couldn’t quite express correctly until now.’

I certainly have been stuck. One piece in particular it took me 12 drafts and over a year to get it just right. The story I had envisioned in my mind hadn’t quite meshed up with what I had written. I took breaks in between drafts, several weeks usually, to allow my brain to concentrate on other projects until I felt ready enough to take another stab at it. I played around with cutting out huge chunks of the story which is when the story finally started clicking. But never once did I think I was in the midst of writer’s block.

I certainly have been overwhelmed at the challenge of a story. An idea that sounded great in my head has paralyzed me with anxiety and fear as I try to translate that idea into a story. I worry about my ability to do justice to the story and the characters. So, I step away for a few moments, get lost in a Wikipedia or IMDB black hole of celebrity nonsense, before telling myself to just write something down. It is a start and doesn’t have to be a perfect product.

And sometimes you just need to realize a piece may need to be abandoned. It could be a permanent detachment or temporary. I’ve learned not everything I write needs to be revised or polished. I don’t do this for projects I want to submit for a contest or anthology rather for one-shot pieces I felt inspired to write. Sometimes just leaving it as a rough draft is all that it requires. I watched an interview with Jess Walter who spoke about working on and off on a project over several years because he just hadn’t developed the emotional maturity to complete it. Once he felt he was ready, he went ahead and finished the project. Doesn’t sound like writer’s block to me.

In conclusion, I say feel free to rid yourself of the term writer’s block. Your creativity, your ability has not let you down. Just give yourself time to get past the hurdle, the barrier to completing your piece.

Musings

Weekly Musings: A Lost Love

DH Hanni

Over the past few months, a lost love has slinked its way back into my life. But it’s not someone my husband should be worried about, although this love is quite formidable and has been in my life far longer than he could ever hope to be. This love can be found anywhere, sometimes it is small and unassuming, sometimes large and hard to miss. This love covers all things known to man and some only known to aliens. It contains all forms of expression: the good, the great, the bad, and the ugly but only the mind and the heart can make that judgment. My lost love beckons me in the form of ink, paper, pictures, and as of late, me in kilobytes. My lost love is the library.

I’ve had a library card as long as I can remember being eligible for one. Growing up, the library was my favorite place, perhaps in part because it was pretty much the only place I was allowed to go, because it held all these books you could get for free. I don’t remember how many times a week I went to the public library but it had to have averaged at least once a week. I loved looking through the rows of the books, the number of rows expanding as I got older, to find something I hadn’t read. A small thrill would go through me as I raced to get through a stack of books before they were due. Don’t misunderstand, I wasn’t trying to speed read them for the sake of getting through them, no, I wanted to make sure I understood what I read but the added factor of a due date was a challenge for my brain. I imagine it’s the nerdy equivalent to bungee jumping or something.

When I was a teenager, both the public and school libraries were transitioning into installing computers. I didn’t think much of computers. I’d played a few games on them at a friend’s house and occasionally ‘Oregon Trail’ at school although I preferred my gaming to be on a console but other than that, I didn’t see what the big deal was. I was introduced to the Internet as a research tool my junior year of high school. It was still very new, still very slow, and clunky to use. Didn’t help when you misspelled a word resulting in no search results (yes, the Internet didn’t used to ask you if you actually meant something else). As a research tool, I found it inefficient and lacking the kind of information I could find much faster amongst the books. Card catalogs and the Dewey Decimal System for the win!

But an odd thing happened to my love when I went to college. I began to fall out of love with the library. I have determined it was because during college, I read so much for school, that the idea of reading for fun, a function I had associated with the library, was squashed. The library during college was purely a means to find books I, thankfully, didn’t have to pay for in order to complete a paper. Didn’t help the library building was a reflection of hideous 1960s architecture. I’ve been to my alma mater since graduation and am supremely jealous of their gorgeous new library, designed to look like a proper library.

Even upon graduation, the library and reading had lost me as a friend and wouldn’t regain me for a couple of years. We had broken up mutually, silently, to see other people, to spread our wings. If you love something, you must let it go and hope it will return to you.

Slowly, though, I crawled back to my local library for fun and education. Upon entering the doors, inhaling the smell of ink and paper, experiencing that glorious reverent sound of silence, I apologized for my lost faith in the strength of our love.

With the opening of a new branch of the local library system this past week, conveniently close to my house, I am reminded of the power a library has in a community. It opens up worlds to people. It affords glimpses into lives of people we will never meet but who we may oddly feel a kinship to. Libraries, both brick-and-mortar and online, are the keepers of the world’s knowledge. Any time of the day, I can flip through the library’s catalog for book I’ve heard about through some other book I’m reading or via a website. There is even the possibility of contacting a library in another country for materials not available locally.

Yes, the library and I are in love again. When you offer a girl the whole world, how can you turn a suitor down?