Tag Tackles Genres. Again.

I’ve talked about genres before on this blog, but a conversation with my friend Wonderdog led to tackle it again.

Wonderdog was marvelling over my ability to write many different genres, and I said my books were all similar types of story, just with a different genre focus. I mentioned one book I was struggling with, since I couldn’t decide if it should be fantasy or romance. We then got to talking about what I would need to change to make it fit into one category or the other.

Firstly, it is worth covering what genre is:

Simply speaking, genre is the primary emotion of the book. It is also a label that allows booksellers and librarians to easily shelve your book so it can be found by readers who will enjoy reading it.

So, what do I mean by the primary emotion? Well, the primary emotion you should feel while reading a horror novel is fear. The primary emotion you want to experience while reading a romance novel is love or infatuation. Action is excitement. Thriller is tension. Drama is often nostalgia. Fantasy is wonder. Obviously, most novels will have a range of emotions. It’s very difficult to make someone feel an emotion strongly without contrast. To have high highs, you need low lows.

However, in most cases, the primary emotion is going to correspond with the genre.

And when people go looking for a book, what they are really looking for is how that book will make them feel. Good, sad, intelligent, whatever. Which is why you should want to be grouped in the correct genre in bookstores. If you are grouped in the wrong genre, then people are not going to get what they want, and they are going to be disappointed.

Not knowing your genre doesn’t make you cool, special or different. It just makes it hard for your book to find readers, and tells me it has no strong emotional impact.

Have you stopped bragging about defying genre now? Good. Let’s go on.

Next Topic: What Makes A Story One Genre Or Another?

Quite simply, it’s the focus and word use. In a previous post, I talked about atmosphere and gave three descriptions of the same room. I used those examples to demonstrate how you can take the same information and, in the way your present it, completely change the reader’s perception.

Genre is basically the same. It’s not the content itself, but how you present it. Take for example a man with a sword. In a fantasy, I might introduce him like this:

He was big, brutish. The sword at his side had seen a lot of use. He moved like a fighter, light on his feet and much too alert to be the simple merchant he claimed.

However, in a romance, he might look a bit more like this:

He was tall, roguish. The sword at his side had seen a lot of use. He moved like a dancer, light on his feet, his bright blue eyes alert and attentive. He looked much too capable to be the simple merchant he claimed.

Instead of big and brutish, he becomes tall and roguish. Why? Because big and brutish are not sexy, but tall and roguish sounds like the sort of man women would like to meet. In both cases, he is light on his feet. However, in one he is compared to a fighter, in the other, a dancer. With the added bonus of alert blue eyes.

To go back to the setting and place blog post examples:

Safe and exciting:

The den was lit with cheery, jumping candlelight. Two overstuffed leather couches would be perfect for reading in on cold winter days. The bookshelf was overflowing with titles, new and old, and the TV was so big, it took up half the wall, almost as good as a movie theatre.

Tense and scary:

The den was cold and sallow in the flickering candlelight. Two overstuffed couches stood hulking on opposite sides of the room, like sagging, bloated monsters about to fight. The dusty bookshelf, spilled over with books, both forgotten and abandoned. The TV was the worst of all, a vast yawning blackness that took up almost the entire wall.

I would consider the first example to be suitable for a YA action or even romance, and the second to be a horror or thriller.

How Does The Reader Feel?

At the RWA conference last weekend I was talking to some awesome fellow writers about my psychology degree and if I thought it was better than a writing degree. The short answer is ‘yes’. However, that is true for me, and might not be true for everyone else. It depends on your skill and temperament.

I quickly realised the ladies I was speaking to thought psychology was important to learn how to write characters. Which it is. However, you get a lot more out of psychology when you apply it to readers.

There is a joke in competition judging: The story that makes you cry the most wins.

Think about best-selling books. People are passionate about them. They felt something strongly while reading them. Same with blockbuster movies. What about big budget movies that fail? When was the last time you watched a big budget movie that tanked? How did it make you feel? Sort of meh? Like, it was okay, just… meh?

Exactly.

When you are writing a horror, you want the reader to feel afraid. When you are writing a romance, you want the reader to feel caught up in the character’s infatuation. For some of us, this just happens. We can do this innately, by writing things that make us feel those things.

However, you can often have a lot more emotional impact if you consciously think about what you want the reader to feel. Research how to make them feel that way. Both by learning about psychology, and reading fantastic books and studying how other people do it.

Make sure your book is delivering on the promise of its genre.

And if you aren’t already, follow me on twitter. I always link back to new blog posts and often post really cute pictures of my cats. What more could you ask for?

Divergent Thinking and Writing Books

What is divergent thinking?

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking) says: "Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions." For example, if I asked you how to bake a cake, you can probably recognise there are thousands of cake recipes. However your instructions will probably include spoons, bowls and an oven. What if we use clay? What if we use lava to cook? What if we make an 'oven' using a super hot car in the sun in summer?

Sir Ken Robinson did an excellent talk on the subject which can be found here, on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzBa-frc2JA) which I highly recommend. The most important part, in relation to this blog post, is the section about the test they did on schoolchildren, examining their divergent thinking abilities. It found that children are best at divergent thinking in kindergarten and progressively lose the ability as they age. Ken hypothesises it is conditioned out of us by the school system and I agree.

You will always be punished for divergent thinking by peers.

For a short period, when I was 12, I went to a very fancy private school. I did not thrive there.

For mother's day, we were instructed to paint pots. An art teacher came in and gave us very direct lessons on how to paint the pots. The body of the pot was to be white, the rim coloured, then we were to paint a specific flower pattern on the white part. All of the pots would be virtually identical. Pretty, but mass produced.

I had a much more interesting idea for my pot. A sort of Inca mosaic. However when I tried to bring it to life, I realised we had not been given the right colours to realise my goals. We only had the white, the purple and small dabs of the 'flower' colours.

My pot did not turn out well. However out of the 28 pots painted that day, it was the only original. All the pots were on display at the front of the class and after a week of listening to my classmates ruthlessly mock both me and the pot, I quietly asked for paint in a lunch break and painted it white. With a purple rim. There was no time to add the flowers before I gave it to my mother.

I was glad about ten years later when she threw it away.

And so I learned, as we all do, that divergent thinking is a punishable offence when dealing with peers.

However I refused to stop. Every activity we were given, I found an alternative way to do it. Steadfast, through all the bullying. To this day I regret caving in. I regret painting over my ugly pot.

However you will be applauded when it works.

Around the same time, I went to an art workshop run by a very famous aboriginal painter. There was about 100 students there. This man's art sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and, as an example, he painted a killer whale on cardboard, right in front of us.

We were then all given paints and told to paint something. The artist would then judge our entries and the winner would get to take home the painting he had just created.

I watched everyone around me try and copy his whale. Poorly. I knew I couldn't copy his whale and I didn't want to. I think I painted a crocodile, in the style of the cave paintings I grew up around at Laura and Aurukun.

I could hear the kids around me mocking me as I painted. "Look at what she's doing! It's not even a whale!" You'd have thought I was eating the goddamn paint. I didn't care. I never wanted to copy, only to create.

I won.

And that was when I learned a second valuable lesson. The people at the top don't want clones. Divergent thinking will be rewarded when it works.

Divergent thinking rarely works.

You might be thinking: 'I bet your pot was better than the other pots and kids were just jealous'. No one was jealous of that pot. It was the ugliest pot ever painted. Mostly because I didn't have the resources I needed. Had I been more experienced, I could have worked with what was there. But I wasn't, and I didn't, and it was a hideous pot.

When I tried to make up my own swimming stroke at the school swimming carnival and my team lost, it was great divergent thinking, but a terrible time and place to test my theories. I was bullied for that too. So much, I remember the teacher having to pull another student off me who was trying to rip out my hair.

This all applies in a general sense to writing too. New genres, odd stories, things that 'break the mold', most of them suck. Then, sometimes they don't. Harry Potter springs to mind, and Blair Witch Project. Along with any other book or movie that 'spawned its own genre.'

Divergent thinking and you.

When you were five, you were really good at divergent thinking. I'm still pretty good at divergent thinking, but I don't expect you to be. I was spared the conditioning largely due to staying out of traditional schooling models as a child and partly because I lack a certain capacity for empathy that means I am largely unaffected by others. It has pros and cons.

You probably don't want to be good at divergent thinking for the same reasons I am. However it is important you realise once you were good at it, and that you are now bad at it because you were punished for it. Brutally. For years and years.

Now, when you feel a divergent idea coming on, you probably suppress it. Quickly. You quickly tell yourself it's too different, too odd, unmarketable. Whatever. You're really just trying to spare yourself the pain of what you have experienced in the past. Don't touch fire, fire is hot. Don't be too original, originality will be punished.

The problem is, if you see 'failure' as punishment, you're probably going to keep being punished. Because while divergent thinking leads to a lot of ideas, odd, original and new ideas, that doesn't mean they're good. In fact, they're probably not. But that is okay.

The key to winning with divergent thinking isn't to hope it's going to be successful, it's to say: 'Okay, this is likely to flop, but what if we tried it this way?' and be okay with the outcome, whatever it is.

For me, divergent thinking is about creation, curiosity and enjoyment. I enjoy the act of finding out if something works. The outcome is less important. Which is probably why I love writing, but am a bit blasé about actually selling books. They tend to go to whichever editor asks me for something.

And you know what those editors say when they read whatever handed them? 'Different' and 'not what I was expecting'. Which most of us are conditioned to think of as insults. They also say 'exciting' and 'loved it' and 'original'.

Which is nice. I love positive feedback. However I'm usually off painting another ugly pot by then.

Branding and Career - Part Two: Who is Your Target Audience?

“To be a success as an author, all you need is ten thousand people, each willing to give you $10 a year.”

I’m not sure who said that, but I read it recently and it stuck with me. Ten times ten thousand is one hundred thousand. Which seems like a very nice living to me too. However, if you’re writing and selling books, you’re probably not getting ten dollars per unit sold.

I strongly believe in the ten thousand fans idea though, so when you are planning your career, you need to think about what it will take to get ten dollars from each fan every year—keeping in mind publishers or Amazon are going to take their cut. So that may translate to three novels a year. Or a dozen short stories. Or a novel and a webinar. Or two novels and merchandise. What you offer fans, and how you get your ten dollars, is going to be unique to you.

As a fan, my top choice would be to get three novels from my favourite authors each year. I’d be paying more than ten dollars though, and they would be getting a lot less. I bought the kindle version of ‘King’s Rising’ the day it launched for $7, but I suspect C.S Pacat probably received about $2 of it, depending on her contract.

For her to get $10 off me a year, I guess she’d have to write five books. I would be extremely happy, but I don’t think she writes that fast. Of course, C.S Pacat has a lot more than 10, 000 people buying her novels.

So who are your 10, 000 people?

If you’re going to have a loyal fan base, you need to know who they are, so you can cater to their interests. It’s a bit recursive though, since you’re trying to work out who likes your stuff, so you can write stuff they like, so they like your stuff.

But let me put it this way: let’s say you write action/horror and your audience is men in their 20s. Men in their 20s also like things like video games and attractive women, and they worry about things like their careers, finding a long term girlfriend (or boyfriend) and their role in society. So if you had none of those themes in your first book, but added some in to your second book, those men in their 20s would probably relate more with your work and be even more likely to buy your next book.

But let’s say instead you write historical romance. Most of your readers are women in their 30s and 40s. They’re not interested in video games, sexy young women, or finding their role in society. Most women in their 30s and 40s are pretty confident about their role. They’d be much more interested in stories that show women their age achieving goals, making a contribution, being sassy and in control.

So to turn readers into fans, you need to know who they are, so you can research their interests and the themes that matter to them and put more of that in your work. Whatever you do, don’t make assumptions. It’s patronising and probably bigoted. Do proper research. Talk to people. Ask people who liked your work what other books they like, and why they liked them. Take notes, then actually read those books. Most readers will talk about books they love until the cows come home, then die of old age. I promise it’s not hard.

Each time you write a book, before you start, make a note:

Target Audience:

Age?

Gender?

What themes and conflicts interest them?

What other books are they reading?

Why?

If you really pay attention to what people are saying, and don’t just impose your own beliefs and attitudes over theirs, you’ll see a difference in how people respond to your work. It will take two or three books for you to really see the tangible effects of this. But in the mean time, it gives you a sense of grounding. Particularly when you start editing, pull your hair in despair and think: ‘Who will ever read this crap?’

It also helps, of course, in deciding what platform is best for promoting your work. Go where your fans are.

Final Thought:

Remember, you’re not changing what you want to write to cater to other people’s interests, you’re just adding in a little extra on top of the stuff you are passionate about.