If you ever want an eye-opening view of humanity, how we function, and our shaky relationship with reality as it truly is, take a class or read about perception. It’s a fascinating subject, one of my favorites, really. I could go on and on, but I’ll give you the short version. Our brains process quite a lot of information (through our senses) every second of every day just to keep us from walking into walls. Even so, there’s far too much information for our brains, as impressive as they are, to sort through at any given moment. We can’t keep up with the visual data alone. So, short-cuts are wired into the very core of the system. We make assumptions and guesses all the time without knowing it. We have to. Our brains would be overwhelmed otherwise. The interesting thing about this is that even if an assumption works to keep us from falling down a manhole, that doesn’t mean the assumption is accurate. It’s merely functional for the time being. Think about it. Our base design is such that we are not capable of seeing the absolute truth. At our base we are inaccurate creatures. We live by guesstimates. Trust. Faith. And that is the source of so many of humanity’s greatest joys and heart aches.
I think you can see where I’m going with this and how it applies to genre labels. Last I checked there were over eight million books listed on Amazon. Eight million. Can you imagine sorting through all that to find something to read without some sort of a rough guide? Impossible! Therefore, we use short cuts: genre labels. The trouble is, writers are creatives. Creatives have to push the borders of their world in order to create something new and different. Thus, the borders are constantly shifting. It’s the nature of the beast. Frustrating as this is, it’s a good thing. The mutability speaks of the health of the genre. Settling into absolutes that never alter means stagnation and without growth genre would be dead. The other thing to remember is that genre, like anything else, has fashions and fads. Joe points out that yesterday’s serious literature (which was heavy on fantasy elements) isn’t like that of today’s (which is more reality based.) That shouldn’t come as a surprise. So, throw all that together and you can see why most writers seem to be so frustrated by genre labels from time to time. I know I do. Our relationship is complicated.
mazarkis on January 12, 2012
I too have become fascinated by perception of late. Our mind can do scary things to us, but we need our minds, so we can’t really give them a time out.
Stina on January 12, 2012
True. Thus the ‘eye-opener’ aspect of perception and why my characters tend to struggle so much with Truth and/or Reality. [shrug]
Stina on January 12, 2012
Oh, and one more thing…
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that our relationship with the internet is equally as sketchy. Too much data + browsers that attempt to interpret the information you want to see based upon the information you regularly access = a biased view of facts.
(I just had a Columbo moment. LOL.)
Nathan Long on January 12, 2012
Interesting points, Stina. I’ll sorta be covering some of the same ground tomorrow. Categories as both necessity and straightjacket, etc.
Stina on January 12, 2012
Cool. I look forward to seeing yet another angle on it.
Paul (@princejvstin) on January 13, 2012
Also to the point, perception is such that five people can point at a book and see five different sub genres. Not only because of their opinion, but of the different things each of them sees or different sees.
Is Boneshaker a zombie novel or a Steampunk novel? What about science fantasy novels?
Stina on January 13, 2012
Oh, absolutely, Paul. There’s that side of it too. Some people refuse to call my novel an Urban Fantasy because it isn’t a Romance. Others insist that it is Urban Fantasy because it contains magic in an urban setting. (My definition, by the way.) It effects me quite a lot because people who define UF by way of Romance get very upset because they feel they’ve been lied to. [shrug] Nothing I can do about that.
You can always tell when the boundaries are shifting when new terminology crops up: science fantasy, historical urban fantasy, steampunk and so on. I think it’s interesting.
W.G. Marshall on January 13, 2012
Interesting post. I’m definitely overwhelmed by the distractions of our multimedia culture, and yet I’ve always been uneasy with genre labels. I fear they’re a form of stereotyping, automatically segregating books into ghettos where only fans of that specific genre will ever look at them. Maybe I’m wrong about this; I hope so.
Stina on January 13, 2012
And this is when hand-selling books kicks in. Word of mouth will always re-route quite a few readers past their initial prejudices. Once that happens the flood-gates are set to open as it were. I get quite a few readers who say they didn’t usually read or like fantasy. That’s because I’ve been playing with the borders between historic fiction and urban fantasy — as opposed to outright alternate history. See what I mean? Yes, the labels can be problematic. (See my reply to Paul, above.) But largely a good book will find readers, regardless of the label. If by chance it gets popular, the audience simply changes the problematic label. (Which I find amusing from time to time.)