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Today’s post on how to transcend genre in fiction is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento, friend and fellow writer, academic, and creative-writing advisor. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn, and also take a look at his blog and his page on Bandcamp.

In today’s entry, I will discuss (albeit quickly) something that has bothered me for a long time: The genre/literary fiction split. I’ll try to propose solutions for that, including some writing exercises to get those creative juices flowing on our way to transcending genreBy the way I phrased it, you may notice I consider literary fiction a genre too. Food for thought, eh?.

How To Transcend Genre: a Necessary Introduction

Reading this blog entry, you must know me by now. I’m Brazilian, which means I chewed on the anglophone culture of the late nineties during the first decade of the 2000s (blame me, but I still enjoy nu-metal wholeheartedly). This is due to international political-economic relations that I do not intend to analyze here, but I recommend reflecting on the issue.

All that means I consumed my fair share of genre fiction. Importantly, it was never referred as such. It was merely fiction, no labels attached. If I wanted to know what a particular book was about, I had to read the back cover blurb or ask someone who read the book. We’ll see why the lack of labels matters.

Tiny Literary Autobiography

For a tiny literary biography, I took a historical route, starting with Sherlock Holmes – some of the best stories (according to the publishers’ preface to their own selections). From there I went on to nineteenth-century realism, early twentieth-century science fiction, and read some fantasy too, just to end up loving me a lot of noir.

When, as a teenager, I enjoyed all that written fiction beside videogames and superhero comics, I was experiencing an interesting artistic innovation but was unaware of it. I could instinctively notice something in the air, yet I was unable to elaborate what the heck was going on. That’s what I’m here for today.

What’s with the Genre/Literary Fiction Split Anyways?

As stated previously, I’m Latin American and, here, there’s no separation between genre fiction and literary fiction. Surprising, I know. Currently there have been discussions about this split, primarily fueled by English-language translators or publishing houses partially bought by Penguin/Random House (or other big international publishers).

When I say that there was no such divide, I mean we really grouped everything together.

The bookstores first spread books according to content, so technical books went to one side and fiction to another. Then they divided the technical books by subject: cuisine, law, dictionaries, philosophy, history, etc. Fiction was split fourfold: poetry or prose, national or international. Simple as that.

The Diversity of Experience

Our reading mirrored the absence of division of books. We read everything. Strange as it may seem, this made us versatile and voracious. If we liked the experience of reading a book, at any point of a quite long time interval (adolescence in its entirety), we looked for more books to read and we didn’t expect them all to be on the same subject, or with similar characters, or narrated in the same diction. The diversity of experiences was crucial to the adventure of reading.

I originally wrote in the previous paragraph: “We read everything indistinctly”, but that’d be incorrect. We noticed differences, we were young, not dumb! We so accurately grasped what differentiated this book from that one, that we actually compared reads very often. Kids have a propensity for comparative literature, see? Born genius or something of that sort.

Jokes aside, we read far and wide because the genre/literary fiction divide did not exist. We would compare novels to games to films all in one shot. Except for the obvious semiotic differences, all the relevant media could share elements: characters, sceneries, plots, emotions, etc. This leads to questioning…

How to Transcend Genre: Why not the Best of Both Worlds?

To some extent, that’s the perfect solution we seek unknowingly. Great 21st century novels – like American Gods (by Neil Gaiman) and We Need to Talk About Kevin (by Lionel Shriver) – show this. The supposed barriers supposedly separating both sides of the divide just don’t exist in their own rights, they’re editorial artifices.

If we really think about the question, it is possible to make some bold but true statements. Firstly, literary fiction is a genre. Secondly, the best works have always transcended genres.

I know I need to explain myself, so let’s go. When I state that literary fiction is a genre, I am not making a reductionism, but intend to operate an expansion of the notion of fiction genre to include the literary. This way everybody wins: It will be possible to extend practices from one side to the other, benefiting everyone.

The Final Fantasy Series: Transcend Genre in Style

Games with memorable narratives, such as the great Japanese RPGs of the late 1990s and early 2000s, have moments of electrifying action in intensely fantastical settings, interspersed with scenes of extreme subtlety in character development, sharp dialogue and (intertextual?) referential playfulness.

An example: Final Fantasy VI discusses love and madness, lust for power and solidarity in the same breath it deploys a “world destruction via magic” plot and has an opera in it, with aria and everything, all the while an ecological crisis tone lurks underneath everything (recall it had a female protagonist for bonus points).

And I will not even get start on how Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the most perfect example of transcending genre; or how the anglophone classification of Latin American novels as “magical realism” entirely misses the point of them ranging anywhere from realism to surrealism for us; or how gothic fiction was both genre and literary before it was cool.

Anyways, back to topic: To transcend genre, we can’t just admire the best works available, we also must get our hands dirty.

A Bit of Advice

Let me preface this section by saying: All these masterpieces are of brutal honesty. I don’t mean here honesty with something given beforehand, but the authors’ honesty with themselves, with their artistic visions, with the flame that burns within.

It will only be possible to transcend genre – that is, to go far beyond just mixing genres or bending genres to their limits – if we are able to conquer our internal locks until we reach an honesty so brutally sincere with our aesthetic project that we will not even ask ourselves if anyone will read our text or if we are abiding by this or that genre’s conventions.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the practical side of things. Below are some guiding questions for creative writing exercises aimed at overcoming the infamous divide.

How to Transcend Genre: Questions to Ask Yourself

• Of everything you have read, what is your favorite? What do you like so much about said artwork? Synthesize that into a few elements, perhaps a single element, then find the same in your own fiction and step it up.
• Now reverse that element in your manuscript. What would a text look like if it was the opposite of the one you admire? Do this.
• Now eliminate this much-loved element. Does your text really need it?
• What does your favorite reading do wrong? Do you recognize them to be shortcomings? Correct them in your own manuscript.
• As we write, we form a vague image of who will read our text: a bundle of reading preference traits. We call this the idealized reader. What does your idealized reader expect from your manuscript? Break down your idealized reader’s expectations. Look for ways to do this integrated into the story. (For a great example of this done with romance expectations, see The Perfect Gray, by Chris Angelis.)
• What are the four or five words most used in the work that you admire? Look for these words in your manuscript and either delete them or replace them with your own words. Find a way to get rid of them.

How to Transcend Genre: Doing Away with Weaknesses

• Find the most ambiguous scene in your story and rip out all excess, make it as clear as possible.
• Now do the opposite: find the clearest scene and make it as ambiguous as possible.
• Then do the same with the tension/relaxation pair: find the most innocent description and make it so tense that the reader can only overcome it by biting their own nails; find the greatest narrative conflict and make it so placid that a monk would say that this passage of text sums up Zen itself.
• Which scene from your manuscript comes to mind most strongly? Spend at least an hour rereading and rewriting that scene to perfection.
• In up to an hour, write a parody of the genre of the work you most admire.

How to Transcend Genre: Overcoming Structural Shortcomings

• Do diverse tendencies coexist in your manuscript? Find what underlies them all and make it so clear that it won’t even seem like there was more than one tendency to begin with.
• What is the writing strategy you most admire? Find a way to produce it in your own manuscript. Done, now you know how to write like the author you admire most.

How to Transcend Genre: Expanding Horizons

• Talk to a reader and find out what their favorite work is. Then read it and try to understand what is best about it. Then rework those elements into your own manuscript.
• An exercise in estrangement: find a dialogue or description in your manuscript that is perfectly understandable to everyone. Make it as incomprehensible as possible just intelligible enough to fit within the story.
• Find a writing rule that you feel confident about and write accordingly. Now break it in the most unexpected way you can imagine.

That’s it for today’s lesson. Write away, kids!