How To Date - How to Write a Book | 9. GENRE

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

In this ninth episode of How to Write a Book, Elizabeth Day’s new podclass series, hosts Sara Collins, Sharmaine Lovegrove and Nelle Andrew discuss genre. From literary fiction to romance and even the occasional fantasy novel, no genre is left un-discussed. What has genre-blending got to do with braiding a Senegalese Twist? Should writers stick to one genre or experiment across multiple? And why should genre be thought of as an identity for your book? Our three experts are here to help you answer these questions. Together, Sara, Sharmaine and Nelle are your on-hand writing community giving you the push you need to get started on that novel, memoir, or piece of non fiction you've always dreamed of writing. And as ever, Elizabeth ends the episode with her own final reflections. We hope you enjoy our ninth episode. Stay tuned for next week’s episode on… GENRE. Books discussed in this episode include: •  World War Z by Max Brooks •  Lord of the Rings by John Tolkein •  A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion •  Friendaholic by Elizabeth Day •  In Cold Blood by Truman Capote •  This Is Not A Pity Memoir by Abbi Morgan •  Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte •  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte •  How the Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk We also talk about:  Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Gilbert, Josie Silver, Benjamin Black, Lisa Jewel, Emily Henry, Jojo Moyes and Marian Keyes Executive produced by Elizabeth Day for Daylight Productions and Carly Maile for Sony Music Entertainment. Produced by Imogen Serwotka. Please do get in touch with us, your writing community, with thoughts, feedback and more at: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One and sip and two and sip and three and sip. Oh, hey, I'm just sipping Tim's all-new protein ice latte, starting at 17 grams per medium latte, Tim's new protein lattes, protein without all the work at participating restaurants in Canada. Hello and welcome back to how to write a book. It's Elizabeth Day here, author, podcaster, an executive producer of this 12-week podclass, which takes you by the hand and guides you right through, from developing an idea to getting your final manuscript ready for publication. And how to write a book is also the place to come, if, like me, you're a passionate reader and want to find out more about what happens behind the scenes of the literary world.

Every week, you'll get an exclusive insight into how and why our most celebrated writers wrote the books they did and what it really means to create unforgettable stories. Because we all have a story in us. But how do we get it out there? To help you through the process, I've brought together a crack team. Leading agent Nell Andrew, best-selling author Sarah Collins,

and powerhouse publisher Charmaine Lovegrove, three amazing women who are also really good friends. So yes, we might be teaching you a new skill set, but you'll also get a seat at our own. friendship table. We hope very much you'll stay for the conversation and the laughs along the way. So now, without further ado, let me hand over to Sarah, Nell and Charmaine. I'm Charmaine Lovegrove. I am the managing director of Dialogue. It's the 12th Division of Pachette. We focus on inspiration, inclusion and innovation, bringing voices to the mainstream

for readers across our society. I'm Sarah Collins. I'm the author of The Confessions of Franny Langton. And I'm Nell Andrew. I'm a literary agent at RML and I was agent of the year in 2021. Now, I just have to say that I love how confident you are from being the one that was like, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know.

I just love that you're like, okay, Elizabeth from Imogen, see you later. Yeah. Right. Let's go off, down to business. I mean, but also the fact that you can see, she is actually rearing to go, like she's energised, her faces. Look at, I mean, she loves this shit. I love it. I do.

I'm so happy. I'm going to be really sad when this finishes. Oh. Okay. We will be discussing genre, my lovely ladies, my crew. What is the genre that you guys read the most often? And do you think that it's changed if he is? so I definitely read literary fiction the most that's because I'm utterly obsessed with people

like the energy I get from people on the page and in real life is what makes me me in a way it's like everything that I'm interested in is about who we are where we come from what we're doing and why and so literary fiction kind of gives me an in on that but really interestingly when I was pregnant with the twins I just listened to to what's known as commercial women's fiction or chicklet. And I just got really, really into plot and really into love stories, which I really just wasn't into particularly before. And since having more children, I have then gone back to literary fiction,

like epic stories around family, around the home, around politics, society. and so that's kind of my big genre. Is it a bit more mixed up, though, now? Or you were like, that was just the break that I had? Was that like just a pregnancy cream? Yeah, I mean, it was 37.5 weeks. Okay, fair enough. People like ice cream and pickles, Charmé likes chicken.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then I love just again being back in the world. And then with nonfiction, I just see it getting like more and more and more serious, like more into history. I studied politics and anthropology. So this is where it all kind of comes from and reading books like how the body keeps the score, sort of more psychology. I'm more interested in our minds because I'm figuring out our feelings and where we're going and what we're doing. So yeah, smart thinking or literary has been my beep. So can I actually like Tony your question a little bit? Because I think you'd be quite interesting to ask

not just what genre you read, obviously you're a writer. Do you also think that writers should be allowed to scoop across genres of do you think that you should stick to the genre that you know? Oh, loaded question now. So to answer your first question first, and because I'm menopausal, I will forget the second one. You could have remained me. I read everything and have always read everything, except fantasy and sci-fi.

Well, actually, some sci-fi I can get along with, but I've never been a fantasy gal. And my kids and I have this debate all the time because they are now into something, that apparently their generation calls Romanticy, which I mean, they're just looking with the Sarah Mass books. Just if there's going to be a dragon in it, you're not going to get along with the book. Okay, fair enough.

But my absolute big obsession, and I used to describe this as a guilty pleasure, and I very wholeheartedly do not do that anymore. It's an open, acknowledged pleasure of which I'm very proud is romance and any kind of romance from the sort of trashiest bodice-ripping one. to the high-brow literary ones. And I am now trying to write a high-brow literary romance. I think you're drawn to write what you love, aren't you? But I'm so obsessed with one of your authors, Anel, Josie Silver, that when I know she's got a book coming out, I ask you, how early can I get a proof? I think it's just because it was my formative reading. And I think

people read mystery because we want the world to make sense, don't we? And it doesn't make sense, but these books that resolve everything can give you the impression at least during the time when you're reading them that it's possible for the world to make sense. And I think that's why I love romance. It's like, I'm a sucker for a good love story and this kind of impossible idea that maybe enduring love and happily ever afters are possible. So her, Emily Henry, and I think I've already mentioned the queens, Jojo Moyes and Marianne Keyes before. Also interesting, when Charmaine said literary fiction, I was like, oh, I thought genre was everything but literary fiction. So I'm like, did I just take a kind of snobby view of the question? Because,

you know, as soon as you said what genre, I just sort of dismissed literary fiction as being the kind of category of its own that sort of supersedes genre. Interesting. So clearly wrong about that. It's not that you're wrong. It's just that it has to be alongside. Yeah. I mean, I suppose it's a genre in itself. Exactly. It's not better. And that's a good point. for us to make. And your second question, I really bloody well hope so, because I want to skip genres, as you know, Nell. Yeah. My first novel was a sort of very kind of classic Gothic romance. And my second that I'm working on now is much more of a contemporary, literary love story. And I think of authors like Margaret Atwood, who has done this kind of thing. You know,

she's written sci-fi, but she's also written contemporary women's fiction. The one about bullying was that Katzai. Katzai, amazing, yeah. She does write books that can feel quite different in tone, but have a unifying feature, which is whatever the Margaret Atwood brand is. And I think that's the key, isn't it? Yeah.

That you can skip genres, but your readers are looking for something in your books that only you can deliver, whatever that is. Do you know, my relationship to genre is very much that I tend to represent what I most like to read, which is usually a little commercial crossover. But I'm going to slightly piver away

because you guys have talked so beautifully and brilliantly about those kind of reading experiences. And I'm going to talk a little bit about when I am shocked by the breadth of a different genre. So like you, so I don't tend to read sci-fi and fantasy, which is odd because I grew up loving magical stories and yet somehow have not managed to translate that

as I've gotten older. But when I am confronted with a book that I'm like, I wouldn't read that. That's not really a genre that I read. And then it just breaks it open into something else. I find that one of the most pleasurable reading experiences. And one of the books that did that for me is World War Zed. Which is so shocked.

So my husband is going to go really annoyed about this. He was like, read this book, read this book, read this book. He was like, no, it's about zombie apocalypse. I don't read it. I don't read it. I don't do that. It's boring. It's reductive.

I don't do that. I don't do that. And then a friend of mine said, you should read this book. And I went, oh, my God, yeah, definitely. It just like, why don't you have a listen to me? I only bloody married you. I opened the book, and I thought, zombie apocalypse, not for me. I can see where this is going to go.

I don't really care about this kind of stuff. And actually, the zombie apocalypse is the surface to talk about how humanity would react on a cultural, sociological, socially anthropological and political level if you were faced with a massive pandemic crisis that affected the entire world. And it goes from the macro of government decision to the micro. crow of the individual. It literally up pings all these cases together. And this was pre-COVID. So reading

it now, with that in mind, must be a completely different psychological experience. But I just remember being thrilled, haunted, horrified, terrified, and just the full breadth of humanity. There was this amazing scene where it talks about North Korea and how that would have dealt

with this viral container which turns people to zombies, which is that everyone went underground. And now the world has managed to find a cure. But the governments of the rest are like, should we tell them? Because what if it's a bunch of humans living in the dark, or what if we just unleash millions of zombies? And so the world makes this executive decision to just leave them to their fate.

And it's at that moment of like, what would you do? What is the ethically correct thing to do? What's the humanitarian thing to do? And I think when genre blends different things, when it's like, okay, ostensibly I'm doing this, but actually I'm going to use that as a launch, pad to go much bigger and much wider, that's when I am completely engrossed. And I feel like only books can do that to the extent that they do that. I hear you on the sci-fi stuff. I always feel

like I should be into it because it is politics, anthropology. It's like relationships. It's all of those things. And it's good versus evil, like Star Trek, Star Wars. I can never remember which one. And I know that because I have friends that tell me about it and like Lord of the Rings. It's just really interesting because that reality check is the thing that I'm most obsessed with. So listening to you, I was like, yes, I do know all of that, but it doesn't make me want to read it more because I can get that in other genres. Where it is really interesting is to see how so many black, Asian and marginalized and minority ethnic writers write in this genre, sci-fi and fantasy, and are doing so much more, which is so great to see. I really love that. And it's because they're able to have those conversations around race or around class or around society and a totally different genre without calling it that and without being pigeonholed as that.

And I think that that is so brilliant and it's amazing to see so many writers take their space within this genre who people don't expect to. But that's why that happens. So I love to see it. As a BMO Eclipse Visa infinite cardholder, you don't just earn points. You earn five times the points. On the must-haves like groceries and gas and little extras like takeout and ride share. So you build your points faster. And then you can redeem your points on things like travel and more.

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Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply. Ah, sci-fi. I mean, I can't say in all conscience that it's my favourite. Having said that, I am very open to having my prejudices challenged. And there was a book a few years ago that completely blew me away. It's Piranesi by Susanna Clark. I happened to be on the jury for the Women's Prize for Fiction that year.

and it won. And it's a book that if I'd read the blurb and I'd seen it put in a fantasy category in the bookstore, I absolutely would not have been drawn to. And yet it does this incredible job of blending multiple genres. And so that book really made me think about both the power of genre to challenge what your expectation is, and the magic that comes from when you really nail every single aspect of it, and you can kind of transcend what we might think of as the limitations. I also love psychological thrillers, the kind of thrillers that aren't necessarily police procedurals, but are informed by the flaws of the character. So a thriller like the talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith or Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. That is so my jam.

So now we've heard about everyone's favourite genre, including my own. And now we're going to move on to defining what makes a genre. Where do the parameters, if there are any, for each genre lie? And when does the genre blend into itself and others becoming something more enigmatic a la Piranesi? Now explores the answers. Nonfiction tends to be pivotal in breaking out new genres. I think Truman Capotee with In Cold Blood, which is like the first narrative, nonfiction, but read like a novel. Do you think that great nonfiction is also kind of delving into those fictional elements that wouldn't necessarily be part of that genre? Or do you think that nonfiction has a different rule set in terms of its identity?

Experimenting with ideas that are hard to come to, but doing it. it in a way that's accessible and a way that's sort of playing with prose is something that nonfiction can do really, really well. And when I think of Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking, I mean, anything kind of Joan Didion sort of does this. She sort of stretches the genre where you don't know sometimes if you're in fiction or if you're in poetry prose, but you're always in something that's in depth and interrogative. And I find her work so interesting to be to do that. And I think there's a lot of writers who come to especially a memoir space where they're doing that. And actually, I use friendaholic by Elizabeth Day as a great example of how to

blend different narrative strands. And so one being the self, one being the other, and the other being history or social commentary. And so when I'm editing, then I say to my nonfiction authors, we're even a platte, which is three strands, which means that you need to interweave these three strands like friendaholic, or in a twist, a Senegalese twist, which is, and then when you're twisting, you've got sort of two narrative threads that you are working with, and those have to be interweigham. That's a really good point. This is my black, my Black Girl editorial.

Yes. Senegalese twist. Senegalese twist. Sorry, I'm like that. Or box. Or box braids. When you did confessions and ran into, you blended Gothic, romance, historical and murder mystery altogether. But in terms of the box braids that come about very beautifully like plackered together.

But when do you think it doesn't work when people are blending genres? Because this is something that I think new writers do struggle with a lot. How did you manage to plight all that together? I think possibly it becomes a mess when you're doing it too deliberately because then you're doing it too artificially. So I think the attempt to do that has to come from a deep love and understanding of the genres that you are box braiding. God, I love these black girls analogies. It's just amazing. You have to be so steeped in them that you kind of have an instinct for what the genre requires and how they're going to work together.

I think that deep understanding is key. And I think, speaking of braiding, the last book I remember staying up, to read all night because I just could not sleep until I'd finished it. This is not a pity memoir by Abby Morgan. I don't know if either of you have read that book, but what an outstanding book. It is nonfiction, so this kind of ties in with the point that you were both just discussing about how this is being done so well in nonfiction, sort of picking up the elements that work in fiction and then introducing them into narrative nonfiction.

And that book braids romance because it's a story, first of all, of a relationship, you know, how Abby met her husband and the relationship they built and the family that they made together. But then he comes down with this illness, which is very rare and misunderstood and at first diagnosed. So it then becomes a kind of mystery about what's wrong with him. But then it moves into a part of the story where the stakes are so high that you read it kind of breathless because it's a surveillance. of the family and that relationship that's at stake, and it reads like a thriller. I mean, it has that pace and that kind of momentum and propulsion. Wow. And I think it demonstrates the idea that if you are going to do that, you need to almost be doing it by instinct. It needs to be sort of coming from your subconscious rather than artificially trying to put, you know, meld three

things together, which is how good braiders work as well. I'm not a good braider because I think about it. Like, you know, I sort of, you can see it kind of awkwardly. Whereas good braiders are just doing the thing. Yeah. The fingers are just clicking. But just moving, click, click, click. It's seamless. I think it's interesting when we're talking about genre, because the more we talk about genre, the more the word identity comes to my mind when I think about it. And I think the reason I say is because in publishing, we can say literary fiction, literary commercial crossover, thriller, mystery, romanticacy, you know, narrative nonfiction, all of this kind and stuff. But I think the issue lies with writers is that genres is just basically its identity.

It's like, okay, let's identify what the book is trying to achieve where it's going to sit. And my issue as an agent comes when a writer believes that the identity of their book is X. And as the reader, I have to say, no, I'm afraid identity of your book is Y. And that's really hard when someone thinks that they're writing in one genre. And the reader's like, actually, no, you're not. And I think that's also an issue sometimes in publishing where we say, okay, we publish a book. I think you touched on this before, Charle, where you said, you need you publish a book and you say it's this. And then the readers come to it thinking they're going to get that experience.

And they go, you haven't delivered that. That's not what this is. You're publishing it like it's a crime thriller, but it's not a crime thriller. It's a bit more on the literary internal side. It's not delivering in that base. Like, how do you get to know what it is that you're writing? How do you know whether or not you're writing in the right genre? I think kind of going back to what we talked about in terms of voice and in terms of character,

in terms of dialogue, right, and plot. All of those things, when you come together, then they fit into a genre. And so you can have a theme. So if you have good versus evil, then you can show that in many different genres. if you have a love story like enemies to friends. That's my favourite one. Enemies to lovers. That can be done in many different genres as well.

But the reality is, is that the tone, which we've spoken about before, like the tone of the writing and what the characters feel like and the plotting already denotes what genre you're in. So if you were writing a sci-fi, it just becomes really obvious because they're not doused in reality. If it's enemies to lovers and you're making them cute or there's like a hook that's something like ice skating or a bookshop or something like that, then you're definitely writing a traditional romance.

Whereas a story like one day, it's more sort of a literary romance because it's doing something different and it's within the genre of absolute reality like of emotions within a very sort of contemporary setting, but it's got this sort of edge to it and rawness to those emotions that stop it from being something that would fit into straight-up romance. And the readers of all the different genres really know,

and that's what I find so fascinating that even though I don't read as many genres for pleasure, then for work, I'm like obsessed with how on TikTok talk, there's whole generations of people that are talking about these genres and as a writer, you can experiment, but it still has to have certain elements that fit. And we could go into that, but actually, part of the beauty of it is reading and writing in the genres that you love. And I think that you can always tell a writer who's not a big reader, a big reader.

And I think part of being a writer is being a reader. and seeing a gap and being inspired by that gap in the genres that you like. And if that takes you to somewhere where you're reading across multiple genres, then that's amazing. But I think at the beginning, right from what comes from what already inspires you and the gaps that you've seen within the genres that you like. So rather than looking at trends, for example, then I would say to our listeners, think about the gaps.

Think about, you know, when you finish the story and you thought, I'd really love to read something about X. I'd really love to read something about Y in this area and I haven't found it. In fact, that was Franny for me because I had grown up reading all of these Gothic romances, you know, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and the Brontes essentially. Gothic romance is such a big part of the history of English literature, especially the sort of formative period of it. And then surprisingly, there hadn't been a single Gothic romance. in that tradition with a black woman at the center of it, I just found that astonishing, and it was a kind of thing that without me even realizing it had been a thorn in my side that I had acquired in the process of all of that reading. So I think it's absolutely key, and I think your reading is going to generate a feeling about that gap.

It's going to identify it for you and draw you to it. It's so fascinating what you're saying about the readers and everything else in this gap. You know who I think really successful experiments in the genre, but is always respectful of the readership. R.F. Klan, the author who wrote Babel. That's an interesting one. It's a brilliant. She firstly, she started off writing Y.A., I think, a popular trilogy,

which was sort of speculative in fantasy elements. Then she writes Babel published by Harper Voyager, which is very speculative, sci-fi element, slightly David Copperfield-esque, which is brilliant. It's absolutely fantastic. And then she writes literary suspense in yellow faith. And you're like, how are you able to skip across all, these different genres. And yet, whenever I'm reading those books, I feel like she's still injecting herself. She's injecting her view. She's injecting what you said here about

writing something that you want to read and writing to Taylor to a concept that she wants to interrogate. But she never messes with the reader. She never goes, okay, I know what this shoulder needs and I know what's best and I'm going to break it up. She goes, there's a respect for if you're coming through this book, this is what you're coming to it for. And she delivers that plus something extra. Now, we've learnt where the porous lines between different genres lie. Let's learn about when we take one genre and turn it into something else, breathing new life into old ideas.

Over to Nell. Sarah, because you're in a very unique position of having adapted your own book to screenplay, how do you know that you have an idea? or a piece of art that is viable enough to be adapted across an entirely different format genre. I'm not sure that I did know. The honest answer is I don't think I knew. Other people saw it. When I wrote the novel, I wasn't thinking about having it adapted. As you know, Nell, I actually, my instinct was to turn down the offers, exactly. I was like, what are you doing? That just wasn't in my mind. I suppose what I can usefully say in response to that is what I was told,

which is that producers, when they are scouting projects, are looking for books that have the potential to be very visual, that also have dialogue that snaps on the page, that are tapping into something that the producers feel is, you know, zeitgeisty. That's what I was told. But I also think, just like it's helpful to kind of do what you want, that it's sort of helpful not to write your book thinking, oh, this is going to be a multi-million dollar Oscar-winning adaptation. You know, just to focus on the book, make it the best book you can. And then if it is, if there are characters that are alive and dialogue that's snappy and there's something thematically moving about it, then TV producers will be attracted to it. What's interesting about

television producers is that they are themselves not writers, but they have many, many, many, many ideas around what could and should work without also being the people who commission. They're like the middlemen. And I just find it, having worked in it for over a decade, such a weird world. And what I love about being a publisher is that when I say yes and then I get involved in your book and I tell you what I think about it and what I would like to change and what I love about it, that means that it's absolutely going to happen. It's not that I'm doing that and then I'm going to take it somewhere else and see what they think, having told you my opinion. The distinction between that is like huge for me. So as a scout, we would work from

horror to sci-fi to crime to friller, just all of the genres. Not so much literary didn't work as well for adaptation. Ultimately, you have to wait until it gets to Channel 4 or BBC or Netflix for them to greenlight something and that's a different process. And so what works is basically based upon what the commissioners for the different channels, different broadcasters want, rather than actually what the production companies are looking for. And so from that perspective, then actually we can be a lot broader in publishing because we're sort of closer to the audience. We're much closer to consumers and readers from that perspective. It's also much more expensive to make a TV show than it is to publish a novel. So you know it

costs millions to make a TV show. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But also just thinking about that whole thing of how you tell a story and going back to sort of specificity of genre. I have found it so interesting, like the difference between, say, a celebrity memoir and then memoirs that tell you about ordinary people and also how audiences are responding differently to that. And one thing that I definitely noticed since the pandemic is that readers don't want as many memoirs. They don't want us to read as many.

Yeah. Oh, God, yeah. Really bloody hard. Really hard. Really hard at the moment. Yeah, since the pandemic. And I think that's just because so far people have been through so much now through the pandemic. Like everybody has now been through something. And so they want to escape. And I think that's why genres like romanticity have become bigger because it's much more about escapeism. Whereas before people were like, oh, I wonder what this life is like. I don't know. Whereas I've lived a life. I've been through a pandemic. Like, I don't need to know about what's going on.

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Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol and select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. when should changing genre be embraced and what are the limitations when it comes to trying something completely new maybe you're a writer who wants to experiment with a different genre what things should you consider sarah asks the question can i ask you guys the question as agent and publisher though if an author who had been successful in what we would consider commercial fiction so say

someone's a really well-established psychological thriller writer, and they want to start publishing romance. Do you think it's more difficult for them to do that then? Because the two examples we've talked about, Margaret Atwood and Kwan, are considered literary writers. And I feel like literary writers get away with that. So does it also work when people want to move between more kind of hard and fast genres in the commercials? Well, look at Kate Atkinson. She's a big problem. She's a literary writer as well. There are no hard and fast rules. Of course, if you've got a book deal with a publishing house, then obviously your editor probably has an expertise in the genre that your book is in. And so it might mean that you have to move for your next book. But the thing that I'm really

getting out with this is story first. Maybe that's a good place. Like what if Lisa Jewel said to her editor, I want to now write romance? Because the sort of righteous perspective is that we often get told, well, then you're going to have to do this under a pseudonym, or we're going to have to rebrand or reposition. That's because the publishers don't want to because they want you to write in the genre that they've built you up in. So that is my question and that seems to happen more with commercial than literary fiction.

I just feel really strongly that just because people say things in publishing does not mean that they're right. It's just an opinion. To contend with it, you know, so speaking from the writer's space, we get told these things and there's a certain sense that the publisher's word on these things is law. I have been told, for example, there's an expectation built.

We've worked to develop a brand for you. And so, you know, it's not entirely the writer's choice to depart from that brand. I mean, that is the reality. Can I understand? There are other things that all the factors are playing. I'm going to be slightly with one of my favorite position, controversial, and say that I think showing you were published in a certain kind of vein, but I think that it would be very difficult for someone writing in romance.

to switch and start writing a thriller. I think if you're writing nonfiction, I will explain, I'm going to go into it. Don't worry, the violence is coming. The cuddle is ready. I don't think it's just reality. So from nonfiction to fiction, I think you can do it. I think that's fine.

Look at Elizabeth Gilbert. She wrote a commercial nonfiction book. And because it was such a huge success, has now been able to go and write literary fiction. She can write flatly literary crossover. She's been able to go and do that. I think that as an agent, if I wanted to go up to most publishers and I said, okay, Josie Silver wants to now write psychological suspense, they would be like, that's not her

brand. Her brand is this. Readers come to her for this. When they see her name, they're going to say, this is what we will expect. We will basically have to reinvent her from the ground up and move all the way. And then we'll have to publish her interest you to them. I don't just think it publishes, though, I think it's because retailers are the same. I think the dictate comes from we've got this one person, how can we position we need two spaces? This is what we just come to them for. I think we are dictated to

a lot by retailers. And I think retailers tell us information and we then use that. I do think it's hard. I think that's why Benjamin Black is the pseudonym for John Bannibal because he wanted to write crime. And people were like, you can't write crime. You've got to move across and do this instead. This really upsets me.

I know it does. It's why I raised it. How amazing that you can do it. I don't think authors, before they're published, realize how much the process depends on what the big book retailers want or will be able to sell. Yeah, to get behind, as horrible as it is, and I think, look, you're right. Is that a hard and fast rule? No. But probable and possible are not the same things. As an agent, if someone said, do you think I can do this? The probability of that is probably going to be this. And that is just the way it is. And is that right or wrong? I don't know if that's necessarily the right question. It's a business.

is our job is to sell books. If you want to go into art and heritage, my husband works in art and heritage, go and do that over there. They do not make a huge random money, but they make a great amount of like heritage. I think in order to be able to be a business, to keep the lights on, people have to make very financially savvy decisions. And unfortunately, that is driven by what they believe and anticipate people will want and how they can anticipate the marketing to that and what they believe that retailers will get behind. We can slightly fudge it. We can slightly move things across, but I do you think it's really hard. And also, Sarah, when you were adapting Confessions of Funny Lantern for a screenplay,

you wrote a book that lent itself to being adapted to a screenplay. You wrote a book, but film and TV people said they really wanted. But sure, you and I know this. There are also people who are writing books and film and TV say, that's not what people want. And it's hard. Do you know what the right answer is? I just know that there are business decisions at play, And we are not always in charge. I just don't think it's helpful for writers to not think that they can do what they want. Like in the end, they have to be able to do what they want. And I think it's really important to not overly think about what people are allowed to do.

The thing I'm very passionate about as an author is that this industry can be extremely damaging for the mental health of authors who are generating the product that everyone wants to sell. And it is incredibly destructive to your mental health to generate a product which requires soul and heart and art, but then have to translate your own kind of sensibility into being able to survive that product being dealt with as a commodity. And as Nell says, the reality is people are trying to sell books. And if you're not careful, if your expectations are not managed properly by the people who are introducing you to the industry, your agent and your editor, it can really damage your sense of self and your mental health and your whole experience for the process. I know so many authors for whom publication has been a net negative because they just didn't understand the commercial realities of the system. I think we can all agree that you should be able creatively to do what it is that you want to do. We also understand the fact that you may not always get back what it is that you want out of that process. We can't solve that in this pod close, but we at least are raising the right questions. You probably started this thinking

that we couldn't spend an entire episode talking about genre, but we are the triumvirate of chat. And we did. I do. I did. We did it. Oh, the triumvirate of book chat did it again, this time navigating the complex world of genre. As we've heard, defining your work by identifying it with a genre, can't. It can feel like a loaded and heavy decision, but it doesn't have to be. Because once you're there, there's always flexibility to play with it and hopefully to evolve from it. That's what makes thinking about genre as an identity so important. It can really inform the way that you write by ensuring it's the right kind of thing for you and it's the mode of expression that feels most fluent for you to pursue. don't get too hidebound by it. We can think too much about these things. And ultimately, it's one of those issues that you should think about and then put it in the quiver of arrows at your back. It's something you can draw on when you need to to inform how you write, but it's not

something that should feel limiting in any way. On that note, let's go to a listener exercise that will help you think more about genre. Okay, so listeners, for your exercise today, we really want you to examine a book from your favourite genre. Identify the style, technique and structure and specifically how the genre dictates the writer's choices in the above. Now think about your book. What genre is it in? How does the genre dictate your choices? Are you finding that your book is not perhaps incorporating the traits of that genre? And if so, why? Is it more another genre entirely? Or do you feel you need more of one element and have too much of another so you need to strike a better balance.

We hope this exercise will help you think more about your book genre as an identity and whether this is the way of fit, or if there is a better fit out there that may help you write a better book. We have to end it now. Thank you so much listeners for sticking with us. We will see you on the next episode. Well, I have just finished listening to the musings of Sarah Charmaine and Nell on the question of genre, and I promise you that I did not bribe Charmaine to talk about

friendaholic, my latest book, as an example of a certain kind of genre that platted together society, self, and the world. I thought that was so beautiful, and I actually hadn't thought of it like that. But I'm very grateful. Thank you, Charmaine. It's Elizabeth Day here with my final reflections. And I think my abiding recollection of that episode will be Charmaine's metaphor of a Platt versus a Senegalese twist. I really found that such an evocative way of looking at how to construct a book, that idea of bringing together threads. and making something more beautiful, more encompassing and inclusive when you plait them together or when you twist them together, I think that is really helpful to keep in mind with whatever

you're writing in whatever genre that actually you can add richness to the texture by bringing in these different strands. And I actually think that there's, A more important point here, which isn't specifically to do with the subject that we're discussing, but the absolute wonder and brilliance of hearing three fantastic women who are black and who are powerhouses in their field talking about something in which they are expert and using analogies that we don't necessarily hear every single day because of, our stultifying monoculture and our limited view and socially conditioned view of who is allowed a voice and who is allowed to be expert and who is allowed a podcast. All of those things, I just love that every single week these women dismantle all of that prejudice and all of that

ignorant perception purely through the power of themselves. the power of what they've learned and the power of their language and the power of the fact that they are imparting their expertise to the rest of us. So I just wanted to say that. And then I suppose I, I mean, I'm not going to say I disagree because I never disagree with these three. However, I don't think I have ever thought to myself, other than setting out to write other fiction or nonfiction,

I don't think I've ever thought to myself I'm writing in this specific genre. Obviously, I've written short stories and actually that's a really good example because I think when you start writing something that becomes a short story, it's almost in my experience the writing of it that reveals the form. My favourite sculptor Barbara Hepworth said this beautiful thing about how when she makes her sculpture, she is seeking to reveal the true essence of the material. And so actually the carving, even though you might think of it as chipping away, actually what it's doing is distilling. And I think that there's something about that in writing. That for me, anyway, it's only in the chipping away, in the carving, that I understand

what the essential form is. But that's a question of form, which is slightly different from genre. And in terms of my novels and my nonfiction, I've never really spent too much time worrying about where it might fit on the bookshelf in a bookshop. And now my agent is probably shrieking right now in horror. But I tend to think that it's better to write what you want to write. It's better to write the idea that, as Sarah so brilliantly said in our first episode, the idea episode, that combination of mystique and technique, that idea of going on a date with an idea and it leaving a funny feeling in your stomach, not food poisoning, like fluttery butterfly feeling. I think it's better to start with the idea that you're passionate about and just

see where it takes you. And I think that the genre will come to you as you're writing. And I think that's a better way of thinking of it than feeling that you have to write to the specifics of a certain genre. Having said that, there are exceptions. As Charmaine was talking about, romantasy, sci-fi, these have certain tropes and a reader will come to those genre with certain expectations and beliefs. However, it doesn't mean that you can't subvert expectations and beliefs, a bit like Picasso. I mean, look, I'm really reaching for my artistic metaphors today. But Picasso was a classically trained painter who knew the rules of classical painting and did it incredibly well. And because he knew the rules, it meant that he could break them and subvert expectation and be one of the pioneers of cubism and invent an entirely new way of seeing the world.

So what I'm saying is aspire to Picasso and Barbara Hepworth. No biggie. Just two of the giants of art. Yes. So obviously there are certain very specific genres that do require a degree of like knowing what you're getting into. But, you know, my books, my novels are generally put into the literary fiction bracket. And I've written two that have a thriller-like structure, but I wouldn't call them thrillers. And actually some of the marketing and some of the reviews have called them

thrillers. It's two specific books I'm thinking about at the party in Magpie, which are actually my two latest novels. But understandably, some readers have said, well, they're not really thrillers because they're not police procedurals. There aren't dead bodies. They're more psychological thrillers. And I actually invented a new word to try and describe what they were when I was doing interviews about them, which is a compelling. I hope that they're compelling to read, and I hope that makes you turn the page and want to get at the end, but they're not thrillers in a conventional sense. But that really goes back to the idea that I believe your job is to write the book. And then it is other people's job, namely agents and publishers and booksellers,

to work out how to market it and how to sell it. I thought it was fascinating that Sarah, and I'm so glad she brought this up, that idea that if you have had some kind of success in one genre field or if that's why your publisher has offered you a deal because that's the genre that you stated your intent to write in, then it can be difficult sometimes to switch. But I tend to be unfashionably optimistic about this and just I really believe that it's all in the quality. And if the quality of your writing is good enough, which it will be after listening to all 12 episodes of this pod class, then a reader will trust you and invest in you and come along for the ride. And that's why Sara gave the brilliant example of this is not a pity memoir by

Abbey Morgan, which just shapeshifts between the genres in a really satisfying and moving way. And then the other thing that I thought was interesting was that there's so little appetite for memoir post-pandemic. So I didn't know that. I feel lucky that I got a friendaholic under the radar, even though it's not, well, here I am again, talking about blurring the genre. It's not a straightforward memoir. I don't think, to be honest, I've ever written a straightforward memoir. I wrote a non-fiction book called How to Fail, which came off the back of my podcast of the same name. And elements of that were written from personal experience, but I thought it was self-aggrandizing to write a memoir. And I sort of still do, for me personally, other people

write brilliant memoirs at this kind of age. But I want to say, that until I'm in my 80s or 90s, and then I can write my memoir day by day. Not that I've thought it through too much, not that I've obsessed over it, but you know, you've got to get some benefit of having a noun as a surname. But how to fail I describe as a sort of memoir come manifesto in the, and I think that's what I do really in my nonfiction, is that I use my lived experience in order to illuminate a bigger theme. In the same way that an academic would use reams and reams of research, I use life as my own research. And that, I suppose, gets us back to what I started out reflecting on, which was Charmaine's just extraordinarily beautiful

metaphor of plating and twisting and bringing all of these. wonderful, illuminating, enriching strands together. So until next time, goodbye from me. Thank you so much for listening, and please do remember to like and subscribe and share a link with everyone you know. This is a Daylight Productions and Sony Music Entertainment Original podcast.

Thank you.