Howdy,

So, the topic for the week is writing without borders to break genre boundaries.

Once upon a time, I was recovering from massive dental surgery, and sitting on my couch doing my homework for my MFA. At the time, I had read a few books of fiction that I didn’t care for, which I would not have read if not for school. I don’t regret reading them, but I did have a thought that minimalist styles pre-suppose a deep, embedded knowledge of a culture that is not necessarily present in the readers, and it can create a sort of culture barrier that has more to do with audience than actual idea or craft of prose. I thought that it was interesting and sort of damning, a little, that the artistic movement  and style of minimalist writing had almost no people of color, or foreign writers in translation, among it’s luminaries. I thought something about why I happened to like genre, in that regard, because encountering the unknown or unreal meant that no matter what culture was driving the narrative, I was going to learn about that culture based on what my own would do in response to the unknown, unreal thing. At the time, and even now, it is a half-baked idea.

At the time, while aching and bleeding and considering whether to take the good painkillers or not, I hopped over to my blog and stated my half-baked thing about genre and literary fiction. It caused a bit of a stir, as these things do on the internet. I don’t really regret kicking the nest of bees. I had some ideas in my head that were fed to me by school and work, and I hadn’t realized how deep they were embedded (kind of like the impacted wisdom teeth). That was interesting to learn. I thought it was an interesting discussion for a while. Some people had interesting thoughts, and some people didn’t.

Two thoughts remain, these years later.

Firstly, there are many different stakeholders in the debate of genre.

Secondly, I don’t like kicking bees’ nests, and I dislike it greatly when the internet becomes a noisy box of dogpile fail. I love watching dictators tumble because of the communication systems that exist to stop their thug tactics and institutionalized evil, but watching real evil tumble from power through these tools we all have only trivializes, to me, the sort of casual rage that appears from time-to-time on the internet.

The genre question is a bomb doomed to ignite again and again and again, at varying levels of ignition, because of all the different stakeholders with conflicting interests. Everyone who wants to find a book kind of like the one they read before and liked is a stakeholder. Every marketing or PR person engaged in explaining what a book is about to a reader is also a stakeholder.  The author, of course, is a stakeholder. The bookstore is a stakeholder. Critics are stakeholders. The person who enters keywords into the database for the eBook is a stakeholder. Your mother is a stakeholder; she’s part of your marketing department. Your fans are stakeholders, if you have any. Your dog is also a stakeholder, because your dog will be listening to you read aloud to prepare for readings, and may prefer the sound of exciting action instead of soothing sentences or vice versa.

Everyone is a stakeholder, with conflicting desires.

My stake is pretty simple. I like to read strange things. I like to write them. I hope to sell enough of them that I don’t have to go on the government dole.  The question of genre can be an interesting one, but, to me, it hasn’t been interesting since I had my wisdom teeth pulled.

Genre is a half-baked idea, no matter what your stake is. It is a soft, squishy, and strange idea, that needs to be flexible enough for people to pass it around a room and change it’s shape. That’s how it works. Trying to make it rigid breaks the way genre works. Bend it. Toy with it. Build dough castles with it and press it into newspapers to reflect the ink of the day. Do not break it. Breaking it is not how it works, when it works. Half-baked ideas harden, sometimes, but that’s when they become brittle, useless, and – worst of all – unfun.

I love half-baked ideas. The world runs on them. People get out of bed and go to work at companies with half-baked business plan ideas  and come home to their families and raise their kids with half-baked ideas and everyone is all driven from deep in their hearts by the half-baked ideas that rise up out of our heads like the tips of dueling icebergs, that would all melt under too much scrutiny, but still they keep rising up out of us as our deep monkey brains seek out patterns in all this mess of living.

Like all really good half-baked ideas, there is a great deal of passion wrapped up in the boundaries of genre, too, because people love their particular stake so much they want to hold it like tribes of patriots.