Genre Fiction – Nastasya Parker

This Week’s Bit of String: A heart-wrenching question

In a back corner of the school library, I’ve begun daily reading sessions with one of our Year 10 SEN boys. There are multiple clues in the book he’s reading that the narrator has autism. I asked him what he noticed about that, and he responded by asking what autism means.

*Paths are important, but sometimes it’s nice to stray from them…*

Then he asked, “Does that disability help them get good grades?”

He is very concerned with criteria of success. He considers career paths based on how much money they might provide. And he assesses circumstances by how they might affect one’s grades and prospects.

He worried, “Do I have a disability? Or am I just stupid?”

It’s heartbreaking to see students who, despite various strengths, feel so defined by their struggles that they long for the justification a diagnosis provides.

Judging a Book by Its Genre

Labels are useful because they give our brains an easy path to follow. We think, “Ah, something is this, therefore I know what to do with it.”

If a student has learning difficulties, we might provide literacy and numeracy support. If someone is neurodivergent, we’ll ensure they have spaces available to re-regulate when routine is disrupted.

Book publishers and, one assumes, readers alike appreciate genre labels because they give us an inkling what to expect. Is the read going to be gritty or cosy? Genres can help with that.

Labels can be limiting too, though. That happens for students with disabilities and in a more minor way, can happen with books. We tell ourselves we’d never dream of reading something from that genre.

*I loved this book. Don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it.*

Since I’m in a couple of critique groups, I send work to different writers every month or two. I read all sorts of pieces that come to me, and I comb through each with a view toward maximising potential, and provide detailed feedback. But every now and then, I receive a comment on my work saying, “I don’t usually read this genre, so I can’t comment.”

This happens to the opening of my novel retelling the Creation myth from Eve’s point of view. I think of it as Commercial Fiction, a sort of catch-all. Madeline Miller’s Circe was a massive hit after all, Disney has been re-filming the Percy Jackson series, Margaret Atwood and AS Byatt and Stephen Fry have all retold myths with great success.

But maybe some people dismiss it immediately as fantasy, or women’s fiction. I should work up my courage and ask the next person, “What genre do you think it is, exactly?”

“What Do I Have?”

Somewhat like my student anxiously asking, “What do I have?” while I showed him his EHCP to explain that he’s not, in fact, stupid, I do rather wish someone could just tell me what genre my book is instead of me trying to work it out. When querying agents, there’s no room for a mistake; they won’t give you a second chance.

But it is a bit rubbish, the genre system. Lots of books combine elements. Last week, I participated in the Women Writers Network discussion on women writers who blend genres, while this week, I’ve interviewed Lindz McLeod. She’s an incredibly hard-working writer covering speculative fiction, short stories tinged with horror, and also dabbling in retelling versions of Jane Austen. Truly, her imagination seems limitless and her appeal should be, too.

Stephen King has said that every book is a mystery. I agree with that. And even books without romance have relationships.

*Now I want to visit all the crumbling stately homes and eat all the cheesecakes.*

After my busy Easter break with the emotional roller coaster of traveling to the US and back, I returned to work. During the first couple weeks, I had a few writing commitments including the interview, while at my day job we gear up toward GCSE exams. I needed a fun and “easy” read so I picked a Milly Johnson book out of my TBR shelf. Her books are classed as Romantic Fiction so I hadn’t gone out of my way to read one before.

The Perfectly Imperfect Woman was the perfect read for me that week. A rollicking pace; clever, piquant descriptions; a well-rounded, super-relatable protagonist more on a journey to come to terms with a torturous past than to find romance. Oh, and there was cheesecake, and great big mysterious manor houses. There were multitudes contained within the genre label.

The idea of being “perfectly imperfect” is resonant to many of us, I suspect, and it’s the kind of attitude I want to foster in students. While understanding there will always be struggles, to work out the purposes worth struggling for, and the right support.

Do you have any theories or assumptions about genre fiction? What’s a book that impressed you from a genre you don’t usually read?

This Week’s Bit of String: What circumference and cucumbers have in common

The first literacy group I led consisted of four fairly proficient Year Seven readers. In one task, they had to construct vocabulary words out of individual sound chunks. ‘Circumference’ was one of those words.

The second syllable drew giggles from the boy with the most tumultuous home life. I informed him, ‘That’s a very important sound chunk. Just think, without “cum” in our cucumbers, we’d only have cubers!’

He literally fell off his chair laughing.

Hopefully with that one remark I communicated four things: It’s okay to acknowledge sex, it’s okay to laugh about sex, we can even be fairly clever with it, but we don’t have to go on about it forever.

Perhaps sex scenes in literature should follow similar guidelines. We all know that sex scenes are notoriously easy to do badly. But it’s such an important part of life, it figures in almost every story, whether in the background or upfront. How much should it be detailed? Do graphic scenes enhance or detract from literature?

Sex as a Genre

This past weekend I had a terrific time reading at a Stokes Croft Writers event in Bristol, built around the theme of ‘bad erotica.’

Now, I don’t actually read erotica, much less write it. But I’d written a piece called ‘The Hornet,’ which dripped with innuendo. So, that worked. A few of the others were more explicit, and they were all engaging and often quite funny, clearly written by talented humorists and wordsmiths.

It’s a privilege to laugh about sex, and to laugh about it together in a room full of people. To me, it felt like an intellectual release, if not a physical one.

Some of the descriptions were a bit cheesy, or a bit gross. But let’s face it, sex can be too. Right? I admire people, in any genre, who take on this, erm, sticky subject.

Sex in the Classics

Going back a century or two, you don’t find many explicit sexual scenes in literature, for obvious societal reasons. But where would many of those classic stories be without such escapades going on in the background? Bleak House, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Anna Karenina, even Pride and Prejudice.

It makes sense that as twentieth century literature pushed towards greater honesty with the reader, sex became featured more bluntly.

However, there’s also an emphasis in contemporary literature on showing rather than telling; on pared descriptions and enhanced subtlety. In a way, that might serve to cloak lengthy, open sexual scenes.

I’m okay with that personally, since my aims in reading are much broader than satisfying any physical desire. But it interests me how the dichotomy between honesty (including a wilfulness to shock) and sparsity affect our ability to write about sex.

Crafting Sex Scenes

Writing about sex needs to be approached like any other aspect of a story: fearlessly but thoughtfully.

Books on shelves — ‘Of course I shouldn’t tell you this, but…She advocates dirty books!’

Surely the key to creating sex scenes that aren’t hopelessly daft is to stay in character. Continue using language the character would use. Include only details that further the plot and the message the character wants to convey.

An article in Lit Hub provides an interesting survey of writers who pen effective sex scenes. ‘Many great novels portray sexual encounters as an inseparable part of the extraordinary ordinariness of daily life….as bodily, emotional experiences that inform each character’s unique sense of what it means to be alive.’

Contrasting scenes in Isabel Allende’s House of Spirits, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, or Louis de Bernieres’ The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (that mango scene!), each give sexual encounters from different points of view and/ or at different stages in a character’s timeline. Those differences are marked in the tone and the coverage of the encounter.

One somewhat explicit scene I’ve written is told by an adolescent boy annoyed with his older stepbrother’s noisy nighttime antics on the sofa and determined to stop it. He encounters the scene:

‘There had to be more to sex than this. Piggy grunts. Flab dangling, limbs twitching, glowing orangey-pink in the light of the last lamp standing. Weren’t they getting sliced by old potato chip pieces? No, those chips must be soggy now.’

With that point of view, I’m freed from having to dwell long on the subject, but at the same time, I get to tell it like it is. Hopefully I’ve managed to strike that balance between leaving some to the imagination, and realistically, fully portraying my character.

How have you addressed writing about sex? Are there any writers you feel are particularly good at it?

Tag: Genre Fiction

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