Babel Clash

There is no such thing as putting the creepy Care Bears aside. They’re like Santa. They see you when you’re sleeping, and they know when you’re awake. They know if you’ve been bad or good. And they have knives.

No, I was not kind to my younger siblings. Why do you ask?

I am at once the most research-oriented writer you will ever meet, and the least research-oriented writer you will ever meet. It’s not just tied to genre; it’s a whole setting and science thing. And yes, I acknowledge that it’s a little weird.

See, for me, worlds require construction. Worlds require research. Worlds occasionally require spending six months auditing virology lectures at the local university, taking copious notes that don’t make any sense to anyone who isn’t a medical professional and cause people who are medical professionals to look queasy and find another seat on the train. Worlds need documentation and thought and consideration.

People are the part that just happen.

I like to say that my brain understands how afraid of commitment I am, so it lures me in with delicious research-flavored candy, promising me a joyous romp in the bibliophile forest. Then, once I’m in too deep to find my way out again, it starts presenting me with plots and people and by the way, were you aware that this series is seventeen books long and requires an index? Have fun.

Writing a book is a lot like planning a D&D campaign. First you read the manual. Then you spend six months carefully drawing dungeons and populating them with all manner of monsters and treasures and traps, all of which you document with scrupulous attention to detail in your reams and reams of notes. Then, once you’re absolutely sure that this is the best dungeon ever constructed by any DM, ever, you summon your players…or, in the writer’s case, your characters. And you put them down at the mouth of your dungeon, and you wait to see what they’re going to do next.

And then they set the thermite charges, blow the whole thing to shit in thirty seconds, and head for the nearest pub to get roaringly drunk, because no plot, ever, has survived contact with the player characters. Half the time, I have no idea who my characters are when they first make their appearance. Toby was a changeling with a smart mouth and an occasionally dumb reaction to danger, the kind of girl who would go into the big creepy house at the top of the hill just because she wanted to see what the big deal was. George liked the truth, rode a motorcycle, and wore sunglasses after dark, despite living in a zombie universe, where you’d expect vision to matter a little bit more. It was through running them through my dungeon that I learned the reasons why they were the way they were, and was able to adjust the world to suit them.

Now, I am crazy-meticulous once I know what’s going on, and my second drafts require more notes and flow charts than a calculus exam. But the writing? It’s like Stan Uris once said on the topic of conceiving a child: “I never think about it during.” And I don’t. Thinking comes after. Writing comes first. Writing, and creepy Care Bears. Don’t the worlds you’re working in ever surprise you? Do your characters do things you didn’t see coming? Talk to me, here, Devon, or it’s the Care Bears for you!

Creepy Care Bears aside, I agree with you, Seanan.  Switching between genres can be a trick.  I’ve never thought about using scents to clue me into the brain space needed for a certain project.  Probably because I don’t have a plethora of lovely perfumes to choose from. Not that I’m jealous.  Nope, not at all.  (Okay, I totally am.) But for me, I think music is the best trigger to indicate which of my worlds is on the writing block for the day.

You also mentioned brain freeze–when you get stuck in one genre and no matter what trick you use, you’re still in that genre. Yep. I totally get that.  I just go with it.  I figure the freeze will thaw once the shiny of whatever idea I’m chasing wears off, or the scene that has me brain-tight is finally down on the page.  My mantra is go with the flow, or the freeze, as the case may be.

But let’s talk more about TV, the great distraction on the wall.  I don’t watch a lot of shows regularly. But when I’m writing the steampunk, I find myself hungry for visual candy.  I’ve always had a fascination with history, and I love filling my brain with images of everything, from hats to the inside framework of old buildings.  And it’s not just the TV that fills that hole for me, though it certainly helps. 

I watch movies, browse old patent applications, look for failed or unmarketed inventions, and thumb through the pages of old catalogs.  I get excited about going to steam locomotive shows so I can look at bolts and welds and valves, find myself mapping ghost towns, visiting museums, and walking graveyards to read the headstones. TV, books, the internet, documentary clips, magazines, newspapers, audio clips, and anything else I can get my grubby hands on, all get stuffed into my brain and into the steampunk world I’m building. I can’t get enough of it.  I am hungry for the look, taste, smell and feel of times gone past.

Urban fantasy doesn’t set off my craving for images quite as much. Maybe that’s because I can drive through Portland Oregon (the town where my urban fantasy books are set) and look for a chocolate shop for a haunt, or a warehouse for a battle, or a neighborhood resistant to magic. There have been the occasions when I’ve hit a scene and suddenly thought, “how would this person decorate?  What kind of architecture reflects his personality or his lifestyle?” and gone to look through magazines, or online sites for interior design ideas. But mostly, the urban fantasy is clear in my mind, without me needing to go on visual research binges.

Some authors put together character boards with photos of their characters: the kind of clothes they wear, the car they drive, the house they live in, and the full background on their life history.  I don’t do that.  My characters come to me pretty much whole cloth, and then I discover cool little details about them as I write them on the page.

How about you, Seanan?  Are you one of those kinds of writers who puts together visual clues before you start writing?  Do you interview and chart and map out the details of your characters before you head into a project? Or do you just jump in and wing it?

Seanan pointed out that even before you open a book, the cover art and design is giving you clues about what kind of story it contains. She also says you can tell a lot about a genre by how your character walks into a bar.  (Care Bears with boobs and knives?  Really, Seanan? How am I going to scrub *that* image out of my brain?)  But even with cool covers and pissed off Care Bears, it can be tricky to figure out what makes a book fall into a specific genre.

I’m writing two very different series right now.  One is urban fantasy and one is steampunk set in the American west.  Both of these genres are the kind that people ask me to define.  I try.  Really, I do.  But there is so much crossover in urban fantasy (we know it must have a fantasy or “paranormal” element, but is it mostly a mystery? Romance? Noir? Comedy? Fantasy? Science fiction? Horror? Crime story?) that it is difficult to give a single description that fits all urban fantasy.  Plus writers are creative little critters and they like to mess with stuff.  So it’s pretty safe to say that urban fantasy pulls from the tropes of at least a dozen genres.    

Then we have steampunk.  I can’t keep track of how many people have asked me what steampunk really is.  Heck, I’ve asked what it is too–and I write the stuff!  I’ve heard some good definitions, but steampunk is another one of those genres that has massive cross-over appeal.  Is steampunk adventure fiction? Alternate history? Romance? Fantasy? Science fiction? Horror? Humor? Scientific romance? Yes, yes! And more.

Since I’m writing urban fantasy and steampunk at the same time, I often get interrupted to take care of something else in the other series.  That means I need some tricks to flip my brain toggle between genres.

Luckily, both series have a different emotional center for me.  Even as a reader, I’m looking for different things from urban fantasy books than I am from steampunk books.  It is not just the setting, characters, story lines and tropes that are different, it is also the “feel” of the books that make them two very different beasties in my mind.  The urban fantasy I’m writing is fast-paced, funny, dark, sarcastic, intense, sweet, dangerous, filled with a sense of awe and set in an alternate magical present.  The steampunk I write is a study in contrasts: dark/ poetic, gritty/melancholy, adventuresome/ down-to-earth, mechanical/magical, reserved/wild, and full of the what-if wonders set in an alternate historical past. 

And while the characters from one series simply would not fit into the world of the other series (kind of like Seanan’s stuck-in-a-jar/shot-in-the-chest analogy) there was the one time I pulled up out of a deep immersion in the steampunk to write the urban fantasy, and for a page or two, my urban fantasy smartypants character was talking like he lived in the 1800s.  My brain had gotten stuck in steampunk mode.  It was hilarious to listen to my street-wise big-mouth talk like a cowboy, but it didn’t fit him.  At all.

So I used a quick trick to shift my brain, and my emotional center: music.  For the most part, I listen to alternative rock when writing urban fantasy. It works for the mood of the book and really keeps me going. But when I started writing steampunk, I just couldn’t concentrate with all that rock and roll blaring in my ears.  Luckily, I love old jigs, reels, drinking songs and folk music. And the “era-gone-by” feel of that old music fit nicely with the feel I needed to enter steampunk-mood.

Seanan, do you use any tricks to get “in-the-mood” for your books?  Ever start writing in one world and realize you were writing with the other world’s “tone”? Or is it easy for you to flip your brain toggle?

Devon’s argument seems to be basically “Soylent Green is made of stories!  It’s stooooooories!”  Oddly enough, I don’t really find that I have much of a problem with that.  Anything that uses cannibalism to make a point is a-okay by me.  She also brought up genre cues, the little things people use to tell whether something is horror or fantasy or romance before they even open the cover.

Let’s talk tropes.

Three protagonists walk into a bar.  One is a cranky-looking dishwater blonde in a leather jacket, with pointy ears and sensible shoes.  She travels with her own personal Cloud o’ Doom ™, like Grumpy Bear with breasts and knives.  One is a brunette in black, CJ Cregg by way of Spider Jerusalem, wearing sunglasses in the middle of the day and opening carrying her firearms.  The last has short blonde hair, three-inch high heels, and a regulation tango dress made almost entirely of fringe.  Oh, and talking mice.  Now what are their genres?

The first is easy: urban fantasy (she’s not showing enough skin for paranormal romance).  The second could go in a lot of directions, most of them involving the words “thriller”; it’s the sunglasses.  Knowing that I’m a science fiction writer in my spare time, you can say “science fiction thriller” with relative confidence.  The third would probably be filed in a Meg Cabot-type contemporary romance, except for the talking mice, so putting her on the lighter side of urban fantasy, with the potential to wander into paranormal romance to borrow a cup of sugar, is a relatively safe bet.

We use little cues to tell us what a story will contain.  Buckets of blood on the cover?  Probably going to be horror, or at the very least, some pretty darn gruesome science fiction.  Most fantasy won’t actually have blood on the cover, even if the book itself is drenched in the stuff.  Chick in black leather on the cover?  Probably urban fantasy.  Oh, wait, she’s wearing heels and has visible tattoos?  Probably paranormal romance.  It can be hard to tell sometimes.  Those two genres are kissing cousins, and they have a tendency to sneak off and make out in closets when they think nobody’s looking.

The trouble with tropes is this: there’s a reason the word “trope” shares three letters with the word “trap.”  If you use too many of the trappings of a genre, you’re going to get included with that genre, whether you intended to be or not, and once you’re there, you’re going to be measured against all the tropes you didn’t use, as well as all the tropes you did.  Your urban fantasy heroine wears combat boots and kicks teeth in?  Awesome, but why isn’t she having sex?  Your mad scientists cackle and release world-destroying plagues?  Neat, but why aren’t they raising the dead?  And so on.  Genres are like tar pits.  They’ll suck you in.

Sometimes, the hardest thing about writing in more than one genre at the same time is remembering which tools I can’t bring with me from one story to the next, and which complications I can’t avoid.  Rose Marshall, being dead, is capable of getting out of most of the issues which plague Verity Price simply by going insubstantial and letting people shoot at her ghostly form until they either run out of bullets or get bored and wander away.  Verity, on the other hand, is not at risk of being shoved into a jam jar and left on a pantry shelf for seventy years.  So there’s a series of trade-offs to be made.  Can’t cover your urban fantasy backstory with science, can’t cover your science fiction backstory with “the pixies did it, bite me.”

Some things are universal across the genres.  The gun on the mantle in act one goes off in act three; the protagonist who wears a white shirt and goes out for Italian food is about to need some bleach; pixies don’t like flyswatters.  But other things are trapped by tropes, and they don’t get to cross over.  No matter how much you may occasionally want them to.

Why do I write in two different genres?  It was an accident.  But, wait!  I can explain.

Seanan did a great job starting us off on the topic of why we write in multiple genres.  I agree that the concept of genre is rigidly defined and controlled, and there’s a good reason for that.  The good reason?  Readers.

We readers are looking for specific experiences when we pick up a book.  If we like horror, we want to be cowering under the covers.  Mystery?  Give us clues until our brains hurt.  Romance?  Love, baby, in all its frustrating, funny, heartbreaking goodness.  
   
As readers, we gravitate toward wanting to explore certain experiences when we crack open those covers.  And to make those experiences easy to find, books–heck, even  movies and songs–are sorted into genres.

But here’s a little secret: a lot of the things those genres contain can be found in other genres.  No really, it’s true.  Because no matter how we sort and separate, books are about human experiences, human emotions, human everythignness.  Cue my best Charlton Heston voice:  Books are made of people!

So when I started writing books, I didn’t give a lot of thought about which genre it would be categorized into.  Well, I knew there was magic in it, so it would fall somewhere under the fantasy umbrella, but really, I was focused on this woman who had been betrayed by her powerful father, and then blamed for his murder.  I was focused on loss, and love, and hatred.  I was focused on self-doubt and survival and humor while all the world, and magic was falling down around her.  It turned out to be an urban fantasy. 

Then I had this other story.  This one had magic in it too, so naturally, I thought it might be a fantasy of some sort.  But it also had these wondrous steam-powered machines, and was set in the 1800s with mad-scientist devisers.  To me, it was a story about a man grieving a past he could never recover, and fighting for a future he never dreamed of.  It was about a woman who wouldn’t follow the rules, and it was about the price of undying love.  That one turned out to be a steampunk novel.

Which is what I mean by I write in two different genres by accident.  For me–and I daresay, for most readers–genre is a nice way to clue us in to what we’re going to experience. Wise writers understand what those expectations are and willingly provide it.

But really, at the end of the day, we’re all looking for ripping good stories about people.  About us.  About human experiences, whether those experiences are set in a close facsimile to the real world with folks who remind us too much of our family and friends, or if they take place in extraordinary locals where the main characters aren’t even human–and still remind us of our family and friends.
   
So maybe I should restate my original answer.  I write in different genres by accident because hey, I’m only human.

Devon and I are here to spend the next few weeks talking about genre, and the fact that we’re willing to work in multiple genres at the same time, which is, I suppose, naughty and not the sort of thing that good girls do.  Before we can really do that, though, we’re going to need to decide what a genre is.  (Sidenote: The trouble with the word “genre” is that it doesn’t lend itself particularly well to crappy puns, which are usually the way I sort of ease myself into a topic.  Yeah, this makes me a lot of fun on first dates.  Anyway…)

According to Wikipedia, which is, as we all know, the font of all knowledge, a genre is “the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture based on some set of stylistic criteria.”  It goes on to state that “genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.”  So genres change with time, and sometimes get kicked to the curb as they cease to become relevant.  Groovy.

The whole concept of the genre was codified by two of my favorite dead Greek dudes, Aristotle and Plato.  Before they, and others like them, decided that you should be able to tell whether something would make a good date movie based on subject matter alone, the whole idea of the genre was sort of alien territory.  Skipping forward a couple of hundred years…

We live in a world where genres are rigidly defined and controlled.  Sure, you can mix them, but there’s always going to be one genre that gets called out as the “real” genre for the work.  Got magic?  You’re writing fantasy.  Got ghosts?  You’re writing horror.  And so on.  The genres give us basic rules and conventions, which is awesome.  They also give us expectations and automatic judgments.  “The butler did it.”  “You’ll die if you have sex.”  “And they all lived happily ever after.”

Naturally, the reality isn’t quite that simple.

Living in two different genres gives me two very different sets of expectations to contend with.  By day, I am the perky Disney Halloweentown Princess known as Seanan McGuire, author of urban fantasy, superhero wackiness, and the occasional adventure of the Fighting Pumpkins cheer leading squad.  By night, I am the slightly manic cornfield hazard known as Mira Grant, author of scientific science fiction, zombie mayhem, and lots of things involving pandemic disease.  I’m actually one of the luckier cross-genre authors, in that my two names allow me to maintain a degree of separation–something that can make all the difference when it comes to setting reader expectations.

Why do I write multiple genres?  Because I live in multiple genres.  My life is, by turns, a romance, a comedy, a situation comedy (different rules), an animal adventure, and a musical.  Mostly it’s a musical-slash-something else.  The idea of saying “I will only write one type of life, and one type of story, forever,” sort of makes my skin crawl.  And if you don’t think that you live in multiple genres, well…

This is gonna be fun.

Call me old-fashioned, but I just like the feel, smell, and touch of a book when I’m reading.  I’m also the same person who was bummed when our local paper went from daily printing to an online news vehicle with two days of printed newspapers.  Granted, I still read the website to stay up to date on my city, but it just doesn’t feel the same.  I have an ereader, but I was an early adopter (I got my reader about 4-5 years ago), which means my reader is a paperweight right now.  I have yet to test the waters with the next-gen readers on the market these days (given how much I love my iPhone, I may be singing a different tune once I finally break down and get one).  The question I have, and it’s possible that the authors you edit have brought it up to you three (Lou, Ginjer, Jeremy) is are they afraid to lose the common bond/relationship with their readers?  I’m not quite sure how authors will do book signings in the ebook era for instance.

Also, with Ginjer bringing up the following in her post about vampires, I have a few questions about the future of the genre (and cross-genre specifically)…

Here’s my product placement as an example–next year, around this time, Ace will be publishing a trilogy by Chris Green (BLOODLANDS, BLOOD RULES, IN BLOOD WE TRUST)  They are post-apocalyptic western science fiction horror novels, in which the “couple” are a vampire and a –well werewolf doesn’t even begin to describe it. Soft-focus, they are not!

The trilogy she mentioned (which sounds amazing by the description in my humble opinion) crosses several genres.  The questions I have are, what makes a good cross-genre novel in your opinions; what can readers expect in the future from authors who cross genres (or what can readers expect in general);  do you expect cross genre novels to start overrunning straight genre novels in the market; and at what point does a novel cross too many genres (has that point been reached)?

Happy Monday everyone!

Slightly cryptic subject line?  Potentially.  Unless of course you think about the future…or Back to the Future in this case.  In Back to the Future 2, hoverboards were everywhere.  In the movie, we saw hoverboards in action everywhere in the year 2015.  Well, we’re five years away from hoverboards then, right?  Don’t let us down Zemeckis!

The reason I’m bringing up the future and hoverboards is that I’m curious about the future of the genre.  The book business looks dramatically different than it did even five years ago.  We’re now in an age of ebooks, ereaders, iphone apps, and blogs to name a few things.  I’m just curious, since we have three highly esteemed editors in the genre with us for one more week, what their take on the whole ebook world is.  Also, since I’m sure they have access to plenty of manuscripts, what trends should readers expect?  Are any trends going away?  If what Orbit Books reported last August is true, a world without unicorns could be upon us.

Also, since I have you all on the hook per se, what kinds of tips and advice can you offer up for all the aspiring authors out there?

Lou, you do such a good job of “product placement”!  TWELVE wasn’t my cuppa–but it’s an interesting novel “In the tradition of THE KEEP” eh?

Seems to me that King and Gaiman are saying two slightly different things,

Uncle Stevie is lamenting the rise of “the New Vampire.” Well, as the editor who was at least partially responsible for the “hi-jacking of vampires” (I was Laurell Hamilton’s first editor and now work with Charlaine Harris, creator of Bill Compton, the lovelorn Southern gentleman) I greatly disagree with him, although I understand where he is coming from.

It is true that up until that hapless reporter interviewed Louis, vampires were pretty much the stuff of horror. Post-Louis (and Lestat) that all pretty much changed. Lestat begat Jean-Claude who begat Bill Compton and so on.

And it’s that late twentieth-century vampire tradition that Stephanie Meyer is writing into. I don’t much like the TWILIGHT novels because I don’t much like Bella–she’s entirely too passive for my taste, Too Disney princess and not enough kick-ass chick. But then, I’m not a tween. And really, considering the age group Meyer is writing for, the romance best be soft-focus!

On the other hand, a whole lot of the adult books that feature the New Vamp are decidedly not soft-focus—there are plenty of bad boy and girl vamps (even in Meyer). And the Good Guy/Gal vamps certainly have their rough edges. Admittedly, the focus of the material is not Them Vs Us–but the vamp is still very much The Other. Trust me on this–you cannot extrapolate from Stephanie Meyer to JR Ward!

Truth is, King could write a terrific “old school”‘ vampire novel that would find a welcoming audience, It probably would not be the same audience that reads Meyer or Ward or Harris or Hamilton, but it’s unlikely that these were the readers who made THE PASSAGE a best-seller (the shambling Big Bad Things are somewhere between zombies and vampires.)

Gaiman, as in read it, is saying more that vamps of any kind are glutting the market. I say that the market will determine that!  One of the really fun things for me as a editor about the growth of the cross-genre novel is seeing how authors can play, how they can use elements of sf, contemporary fantasy, horror, mystery, romance, even westerns to create something fresh. And as long as that is happening, readers will stay interested.

Here’s my product placement as an example–next year, around this time, Ace will be publishing a trilogy by Chris Green (BLOODLANDS, BLOOD RULES, IN BLOOD WE TRUST)  They are post-apocalyptic western science fiction horror novels, in which the “couple” are a vampire and a –well werewolf doesn’t even begin to describe it. Soft-focus, they are not!

Last point here–I’m not sure if it’s “commercial” that people are snooty about–it’s “popular.” Cross-genre fiction is hugely popular right now. The notion is, if large numbers of people enjoy it, it can’t be good ( particularly if those large numbers of people are predominately women)

Hey Paul,

I look at genre hopping and genre blending as two very separate things.  Dan Simmons is a classic hopper.  He bounces from science fiction to mystery to horror.  Since he does it all well, that’s okay with me.  On the plus side, hopping exposed his work to different audiences and opened a potentially larger reader base.  On the down side, his die-hard SF or horror fan might decide to take a pass on something out of genre.  Hey, I don’t blame them.  There’s only so much time in the day, and it is natural to prioritize those titles in your favorite genre.

The hopping can inhibit an author’s growth initially.  That’s purely a matter of shelf-space.  If an author has 10 books on the shelf, all beside each other, than that author is more likely to attract a shopper’’s attention.  If the books are scattered all over a store, in multiple categories, it is harder to grab that impulse browser.  Of course, that’s a bricks & mortar challenge more than an online one.

I’m in favor of genre blending if executed well and communicated well to the customer.  If the author is writing experimental work for the sake of experimentation or breaking down genre borders, then I tend to be less interested.  If the author is creating a great story with fantastic characters and breaks down genre barriers at the same time, then I’m more excited.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower is my favorite example of a great genre-blender.  It’s a Western - Fantasy - Science Fiction - Horror series.  He pulls it off.  Sure, that’s concept, but King’s talent also has something to do with it.

It will be interesting to see if Terry Goodkind’s fans eventually embrace his Law of Nines book.  It’s another genre-blender, walking a fine line between Thriller & Fantasy.  What’s everyone think?  Does the cover satisfactorially convey that it a Thriller, a Fantasy novel, and an excellent read for fans of either genre?