Kylie Mason's posterous

 When Genres Attack!  - billed on Twitter as the ultimate genre cage fight - at Shearer’s Bookshop (@shearersbooks) got off to a cracking start, despite the disappointing lack of an actual cage, and was an action-packed hour-and-a-bit of fascinating, sometimes brutal,* conversation.

Combatants Kirsten Tranter (@ktranter),** PM Newton (@pmnewton) and James Bradley  (@cityoftongues) entered the Thunderdome (aka Shearer’s Books kids’ section) with their referee, literary agent Sophie Hamley (@sophiehamley), and parried and thrust to the best of their abilities, not only with each other, but with the rather insistent jackhammering out on Norton Street.

The conversation began amiably enough, with Hamley asking our genre warriors to talk about ‘genre’ as a concept. Newton came in swinging, discussing how she was taught genre with regards to fiction at university, and how she felt restricted by the rules of genre. Bradley responded with the idea of genre as a set of conventions, and how literary fiction writers resist the idea that they write to such a set. Tranter’s opening charge was, unfortunately, lost to this spectator’s ears due to the jackhammering. ***

It was fascinating to hear how each author approached the idea of genre in their own work. Kirsten Tranter spoke about thinking in terms of the story first, and discovering that the genre presents itself as the story develops. She doesn’t make a conscious decision to write in any particular genre – the story chooses how it wants  to be told. The difficulty, she found, was readers expecting her work to follow the conventions of a certain genre: they reacted to how the novel does or doesn’t stick to conventions. This was something Tranter was made aware of by some of the earliest readers of her novel The Legacy, who were almost unsatisfied by the ending she originally wrote and she made the conscious decision to make amendments to her novel with her readers in mind, to give them a more satisfying experience.

PM Newton knew she wanted to write crime, but found she didn’t like how restrictive the conventions of that genre were. She looked for a subgenre of crime that matched her style and how she wanted to write the story. Newton also spoke of experiencing the limits readers’ expectations of genre placed on novels and how this never let up, especially during the editing process of her novel The Old School. She felt she was constantly being made to defend the choices she had made to move beyond the genre’s conventions. For Newton, a crime novel should be more than just a whodunit - it should comment on society and individual human lives.

James Bradley knew he was writing sci-fi when he was working on The Deep Field, but also that he was seeking to renovate the conventions of the genre. His third novel, The Resurrectionists, came up against a genre problem when his publisher UK marketed it as a ‘gothic thriller’, which it wasn’t, as it flouts the rules of both of those genres. Bradley also pointed out that despite popular thought, literary fiction is highly generic: it’s historical fiction, coming of age novels, etc. It could be said, however, that the conventions of literary fiction aren’t as restrictive as those of crime, sci fi, romance, etc.

Discussion turned to the stigma of genre fiction: that it is churned out and aimed at the lowest common denominator; certainly, that is how it is viewed and judged by some readers. And this differs to the way that genre TV shows and films are viewed. Bradley suggested that TV and film forms of genre story-telling are a more acceptable way of ‘slumming it’ for some people, the way reading sci-fi or crime or romance novels isn’t. Newton mentioned that she thought the latest incarnations of Miss Marple and Poirot, while messing with Agatha Christie’s original stories, engaged far more with modern audiences than the novels. The adaptations, Poirot in particular, delve further into the human condition, and the moral and emotional conflict often missing from crime novels. Tranter spoke about how she believed Midsomer Murders skewered the crime genre, being hyper-aware of the conventions. She also spoke about the popularity of The Wire, and how its use of archetypes allowed it to get closer to the truth of a situation than a documentary could. Newton and Bradley also discussed how being written in part by crime novelists helped The Wire move past what modern TV crime shows have become.

Publishers and booksellers like being able to pigeonhole novels into genres. Genre matters to them because it works; genres define what a novel is and what we expect it to be, eg, genre can help booksellers - particularly - to sell new authors if their book is easily defined. Whether reading a genre novel or watching a genre TV show or film, genre helps consumers define their own tastes; as Tranter said, whatever it is, we're still exposing our tastes to others. Sophie Hamley made the point that there are many fantastic novels that never get published because they can’t be assigned to a particular genre, and therefore can’t be ‘sold’ to readers easily. Hamley also suggested that this will change as ebooks increase in popularity, and perhaps that authors themselves will become a genre.

*Not really. ****

**It's at this point I realise I liveblogged the event and got Kirsten Tranter's twitter name wrong every time. Sorry, Kirsten.

***This is where the fight metaphor ran out of puff.

**** I stole the idea of these footnotes from the Bothersome Words and Alien Onion blogs. Forgive me?