Kelley,
First of all, yes, you correctly interpreted my last point about literature being about emotional truth. I agree that it’s difficult to “express precise emotional truth in bad prose” – it’s like watching a terrible movie in which the actors are very good. What’s the point, I ask myself? I also completely agree that great prose doesn’t necessarily hit the mark, although it also depends upon the reader. It used to bother me when I read a book that someone I respect recommended highly and it didn’t work for me at all. I used to think there was something wrong with me, that I just wasn’t getting it. I know now that it probably just didn’t read for me.
You’re also right on the money about “genre” fiction. I read a ton, all the time, and I would say a majority of my favorite reading material would be classified as genre fiction. And it’s not all great stuff – sometimes I just wanna watch stuff blow up, to use another movie metaphor. But the best of those books transcend whatever genre they’ve been shoved into.
I think “genre” is really a marketing term. A publisher has to try to sell the books they are publishing, and my experience as a consumer has convinced me that the standard advertising strategy for any product is to simplify and summarize – come up with a brief, catchy way to let the consumer know what it is. Often it seems that advertisers and their clients make an early decision on a specific section of the public (a demographic) to which to make their pitch. Then the summary can be canted toward that audience. Books cause problems when they cannot be easily summarized or fit into a standard category. I imagine it gives advertising companies seizures. So they do the best they can, pick a category reasonably close to the book’s content (or possibly just arbitrarily assign one based on the author’s past work) and put out a marketing campaign accordingly, which may or may not work.
What do you think, as both a reader and a published and therefore marketed writer?
Another unrelated question: I love reading Ask Nicola and have written a few questions myself (just sent one in a little bit ago). The two of you have distinctive, individual voices. I wouldn’t write a post here in quite the same way as I would a post over there. My question is, do the two of you ever discuss the sorts of posts you each get at your respective Web sites? Or do you make a point of maintaining your own separate spaces on the Web? Just curious.
Keep passing the open windows,
Adam Diamond
The comment about disliking books recommended by people you respect makes me think about growing up Southern, and learning early that contradicting others’ taste wasn’t Nice (there are certain qualities of Southern culture that cry out for capitalization). I’ve unlearned this fairly well, thanks in great part to living with Nicola (smile).
But it’s not fair to blame the South. Let’s blame the whole US. I think it’s possible to talk about US culture in a few fundamental ways, even though race and region and class and gender and physical ability particularize our socialization to such a great extent (not to mention whatever individual family wackiness we grow up with). Why do you suppose so many people in this culture equate disagreement with personal disrespect? Partly, I suppose, it’s a communication-style issue. Some folks don’t know any other way to express an opinion except as a die-to-defend-it expression of self (even Nice Southern Folks, and those of you who live there know what an experience it is to cross teaspoons with a bona fide steel magnolia who believes her taste has just been dissed….). It’s hard to have a conversation about perception with someone who wants to talk about it in terms of core identity.
But there you go: individualism and customized personal identity are fundamentals of US culture. And I like the premise even if I don’t always like the way it plays out. I wish I had grown up with more sense of interdependent community, but I also know that being raised in a culture of individualism made it possible for me to escape my class and much of my negative socialization. (Shakes head). These are the tools we’re given.
Part of the reason I’m riffing on this is that I think it’s related to marketing and the concept of ‘genre.’ Because even individuals need connection, but we sure have to work hard to find it sometimes. Most of us are more comfortable with similarity than difference, and we use affiliation groups, categories, whatever, to help us find our connections. Amazon.com knows this – I think the “people who bought this book also bought…” is a stroke of marketing genius. Because that’s what marketing is all about–that balance between individuality and groupmind. That’s why there is nothing so precious or effective as word of mouth to sell a book. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold didn’t end up selling north of a million copies because it got reviewed in the New York Times – it was all those book clubs, and people telling their friends. Viral marketing.
In my experience, your perception of book marketing is accurate, although I think it’s often a less active process than the one you’ve described. It seems to me that most books go out into the world with “default marketing” – someone writes a press release and sends it with copies of the book to a pre-established list of reviewers and booksellers, and then goes out for lunch. I don’t much like this system, but I understand why it exists. In 2002, an estimated 115,000 books (including Solitaire and Stay) were published in America. An Everest of books. As a reader, I rely on reviews and word of mouth to find my way through the forest, and when I’m browsing in a bookstore I rely on cover art and the “signals” of genre (categorization, blurbs, cover copy, etc.) to help me navigate. Newspapers and magazines often assign reviewers to certain categories of books so that readers can get a certain consistency of reviews over time. And booksellers need to know where to shelve a book so that all us readers will find it. It’s a vicious spiral of categorization. I don’t think it’s a question of least common denominator as much as the path of least resistance taken by the people who have those 115,000 books to market.
I was fortunate that Solitaire was treated, well, more individually (grin). Anyone interested in more detail about this can read this interview with Broad Universe.
And now to the difference between VP and Ask Nicola. I showed your question to Nicola and said, “What do you think he means by that?” She said, “I guess he means we’re different.” Hah. She is so great.
She certainly answers questions more quickly (and thanks for your patience, Adam). She gets many more than I do, so she has a certain pipeline pressure. Yes, we do talk about them. We talk about everything. It’s one of the fundamentals of our relationship.
And we are also interested in maintaining our separate space (that ‘individual’ thing….) I think this is a more conscious concern for me, because Nicola doesn’t generally have to contend with the “oh, you’re a writer too” attitude. This all goes back to those notions of individualism. There’s a set of largely unarticulated but profound assumptions in this culture about partners in the same line of work: that their relationship suffers from competition (or the rigorous defense against it), that the person who “goes first” has a certain right of assertion to being the “real one” while the person who “goes second” is probably riding on their partner’s coattails. The “follower” is more influenced by the “leader” than vice versa. Way more people describe me as a writer in terms of Nicola’s work than have ever described Nicola in terms of mine, as if the influence only went one way. This is particularly troublesome to me, since it implies that I’m not as independently creative.
That’s not why our website voices are different: they’re different because we’re different. But it is partly why I have a website (although I think every writer ought to have one). It’s a way of particularizing me to people. I work hard to make my web voice reflect my private voice. Okay, I swear a lot more in private conversation – but in person I like to riff, to ask and answer, and meander to and from a central point as much as I do here in the virtual pub. Straight-line conversations don’t interest me as much. I wonder what it’s like to view life as a linear process? I never have. To me, it’s a set of fractals, or an ecosystem, or maybe a perpetual set of chemical reactions…. any metaphor that involves change and reaction, choice and adaptation.
And I like to watch stuff blow up too. Multifaceted, me. Cheers.