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<\/a>The literary 'genre' cage fight (left to right): Kirsten Tranter, P.M. Newton and James Bradley. \u00a9 Zena Shapter 2011<\/p><\/div><\/h3>\n
One such cage fight took place last Friday night, at Shearer\u2019s Bookshop<\/a> in Leichhardt, and I\u2019m not sure yet whether anyone escaped unscathed. The guest panel of speakers, James Bradley<\/a> (\u201cWrack\u201d, \u201cThe Deep Field\u201d and \u201cThe Resurrectionist\u201d), P M Newton<\/a> (\u201cThe Old School\u201d) and Kirsten Tranter<\/a> (\u201cThe Legacy\u201d), along with their honorary chairperson Sophie Hamley (Literary Agent, Cameron Creswell Agency<\/a>), philosophized over so many aspects of genre that their discussion could not fail to get you thinking, especially me.<\/p>\n You see, I\u2019m not sure how genre affects me as a writer, or a reader, or a film fanatic, or even whether it should.<\/p>\n "If literary fiction writers say they don't follow any particular set of conventions, isn\u2019t that a convention in itself?" James Bradley<\/p><\/div>\n Technically, a genre is “a style or category of art, music, or literature” (“Oxford Dictionaries Online”<\/a>) and, when classifying the genre of an artistic endeavour, for example a film or a book, you’re supposed to:<\/p>\n We seem happy enough for films to be produced industrially...<\/p><\/div>\n Given the huge range of story-collections established today, genre classification should be easy. However, in the publishing world, literary critics and scholars continually disagree over the finer points of textual classification and some novels simply do not fit in any particular collection of stories. Why all the disagreement?<\/p>\n Well, the Greeks (who invented genre, see above) believed that the type of person an author was, greatly affected the type of poetry they wrote, and that certain metrical forms only suited certain genres. So genre wasn\u2019t just invented for ease of reference, but to distinguish certain styles of literature from others and, in this, there was a judgment. That judgment is still alive today.<\/p>\n "There's a lot of crime fiction out there that\u2019s considered disposable because it\u2019s churned out." P M Newton<\/p><\/div>\n For example, do you remember the BBC’s snub of sci-fi and fantasy books earlier this year (their show “The Books We Really Read”<\/a> sparked an impassioned response from Stephen Hunt<\/a>)? And, as our cage-fighting panel observed, people happily flock to the cinema for \u201cLord of the Rings” or “Star Wars”, yet hide their sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks on the bus. Why? Because some genres suffer from stigmatization, especially speculative fiction and collections of stories produced industrially. Kirsten Tranter<\/a> gave the example of Charles Dickens<\/a>, whose work was published (if not originally written) in monthly serials and who earnt money by reading his work aloud on tours. Yet isn\u2019t it amazing that Dickens, arguably the Victorian era’s most popular English novelist, should attract a stigma just because of the way his work was published?<\/p>\n Maybe we should adopt a more subject-based taxonomical system like libraries where, for example, James Bradley\u2019s \u201cWrack\u201d is classified as 'Shipwrecks \u2013 New South Wales \u2013 Fiction'?<\/p><\/div>\n The solution? Well, Kirsten Tranter<\/a> tries not to think about the technicalities of genre when she writes.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think about genre consciously when I write. I decide on the story I want to tell, then hope readers will respond to that. I like novels that sit across the shelves in the bookshop.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Like Kirsten, I too enjoy seeking out cross-genre novels. The labels a book is given to market it don’t matter to me as much as the story it tells, as long as that story is written well. I think this is because I’m a style-over-substance<\/a> reader. But not everybody likes stepping outside the categories they know and trust. Which is why publishers have to market novels by genre and why, as Sophie Hamley<\/a> pointed out:<\/p>\n \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of great fiction that doesn\u2019t get published because it doesn\u2019t fit in a genre.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Sophie Hamley said, readers themselves \u201care more likely to take a risk on an unknown novelist if it\u2019s clearly in a genre they like. But that puts pressure on authors to clearly identify themselves.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n So what should you do as a writer? Do you write the story you want and, if it doesn\u2019t fit with any particular genre, hope your publishers will risk it anyway? Or do you write in keeping with a selected genre\u2019s conventions for ease of sale? And what if you don\u2019t identify yourself with any particular genre? Genre is not a static concept, it is fluid. Genres form as new conventions emerge and old ones are discounted. So what if there’s no name for your genre because its creation is yet to come. Think of all the famous authors whose work was rejected because it didn’t fit with current genre-conventions:<\/p>\n Luckily for us, George Orwell, perhaps the twentieth century’s best chronicler of English culture, published his allegorical \u201cAnimal Farm\u201d even though<\/em> it was subtitled \u201cA Fairy Story\u201d and even though<\/em> his previous works were published in such an array of different genres that publishers today might have considered him, in James Bradley<\/a>\u2019s words, \u201cunreadable\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/a>\n
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