Genrefication....

 

“Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.”  -- Carlos Fuentes

 

I've got a past. What I call fondly the good ol' days. I cling to memories of my beginnings as a writer.

Everybody starts out differently. I'd been writing, in one form or another, since childhood. First, stories sketched like comic strip tales. Later, in high school, a friend and I wrote fantasy stories, ala Georgette Heyer, Christopher Lee fanfic, Dark Shadows with Barnabus Collins. Later still, another friend and I traded Rudolph Valentino stories. We were hopeless Valentino fans and we blissfully lost ourselves in writing scenarios in which we, of course, were his lovers.

Then one night I dreamed about Russell Crowe! So Valentino got tossed to the side of the road in favor of swarthy Maximus in my new Gladiator fantasy.

Then...then...I had a relentless drive to actually...write. A real story, as in submitting it. It was going to be shocking, it was going to be a best seller. I was going to be famous.

So I took off on a new journey with a new destination. FAME.

Funny thing, though, as illustrious and famed as I planned to be, I still wrote for fun. It was fun.

What more could there be to this writing gig, after all? One simply wrote a story, thumbed through a list of agents, then simply plunked the manuscript into the mail.

I'd like this to be published, please.

The lucky agent, all a-flutter at the most magnificent manuscript they'd ever received, would hasten to find me a publishing house and there it would be. In like Flynn. I would soon be famous.

Please.

Are you going to make me humiliate myself by telling you the outcome to that dream?

Here's the thing, though. It was so much fun. I was so new, so green. So full of hope. I was doing something I loved, and, joy of joys, it was going to make me rich and make me famous. God, how I loved it.

My first serious stab at writing was a Mafia story. It was, at first glance, what is known in the publishing world as a 'hetero' romance or a male/female romance, a story between a man and a woman.

I introduced a gay couple as supporting characters. The genre bible said, this still falls into male/female romance. Whew. So I still had that genre thing on track, that gave me a good insight into where I could publish. Which publishers accepted what, and all that jazz. 

Oh, but one thing.

It is still male/female romance unless the gay couple have on-screen sex.

Uh-oh.

Okay, they do have sex on the page.

So, does that mean...?

Oh, that's different.

You've now ventured over into mainstream. It can no longer be a hetero romance if there is an other-than-heterosexual sex scene or scenes in the story.

Very well, so I'll start looking for a publisher who...

Now I could take the gay characters out of the story, the rules suggest.

Nah, I really like these guys, couldn't I just...?

Not in this story, and still call it a hetero romance. Now, you could perhaps put them in their own story? Then that would be classified as male/male romance. Another genre.

But they belong in the story.

Then no sex from them, and everything will fine. Unless, of course, you go mainstream.

So, that story was shelved for a while. I did try to extract the gay characters and give them their own vehicle. But you know how characters are. The boys had none of that. So, hell. Nobody gets a story. Right?

Mainstream, remember?

Now this is too much of a headache. I'll just come back to them later.

On to another story. My first published story (under my C. Zampa pen name), CANDY G. Piece of cake. Two men in a two-man romance. Male/male romance. That was easy! Gender-ising, that is.

But there I am again. My current story is just the opposite. A story of two gay men with a woman in the cast, a woman who has a huge point of view in the story. She's the soon-to-be ex-wife of one of the characters.

This time, it's the woman's presence raising the flags.

She is allowed, but no on-screen sex scenes for her.

Yes, very well. I can manage that. The sex between her and her husband isn't crucial to the story anyway. Or is it? I must decide if it's important, based on genre guidelines, not by on how important the sexual changes are in the relationship.

So it is still a male/male romance.

At this point, I'm confused.

The bottom line? Life is not compartmentalized by genres. Real-life drama is a big mix of everything. Straight people and gay people interact in real life.

But, to keep in perfect genre-fication, we have to pretend that one of the genders does not really have sex. Well, I take that back. They can have it, just don't tell about it. It'll just be their little secret.

Silly as it is, I have friends who write male/male fiction who act like they'll get cooties if they look at pictures of straight couples kissing. And, vice versa,  author  who do the same if male/male pictures are posted. Genre, baby, genre. (In truth, it's bias and prejudice, but that's another, much bigger issue). Never the twain shall meet in certain genres. 

For me, personally, sex is sex. If it fits a character, any character, in the book, it belongs. If it is crucial to the story, if it's not just thrown in as sex for sex's sake. It doesn't turn me off, doesn't offend me. Others might not feel the same, though, and they are completely right in their own feelings. That's the beautiful part of human nature. We are all different, and it should be okay that way.

I'm not complaining about these guidelines. They are there for specific reasons, and I understand them completely. I adhere to them.

But...But...

I do miss the early days when I just wrote my heart away, beautiful, no-genre writing, everybody all in the same story, gay, straight, sex, no sex. Everybody had their place in my book. It was so simple, so pure. And fun.

I don't resent the way it actually is, these genre guidelines. I just miss the absence of inhibition from those good old days. When I just wrote without having to fit a genre, but I wrote to the heart of the story, whatever that heart might be.

“My favorite genre is Beautifully Written Books of Any Genre. Could we make that a genre?”  - Kristin Cashore