Chapter 4, Genres

My energy is low tonight. There was maybe too much pollution today. It was also hot and dry.
Maybe that is why I don’t feel so inspired to blog, or even write anything. Or maybe I found chapter 4 a little overwhelming, and somehow depressing –even though it is informative, and interesting. I have always known the business of writing must be difficult, I just was not as aware as I am after reading this chapter of Monteleone’s Guide to Writing a Novel.

Chapter 4, Genres & the Mainstream

Here is the summary of this chapter:
- The backbone of the publishing industry is the vast array of genre titles published every month.
- Each genre has a loyal and dependable core audience.
- Many genre novels are published as paperback originals (often called “mass market editions”).
- Successful genre authors are also enthusiastic readers of the categories in which they write.

Maybe I am down because I had a romantic idea about writing a novel. I thought I could just write whatever I liked without paying attention to the kind of genre. Maybe I don’t like the idea of writing for people who will be as demanding as Monteleone depicts them (“a loyal and dependable core audience”). Do I really want to be a Paperback Writer?
I knew there was a market and market rules. I just weren’t aware of it.
And, besides, I am not an enthusiastic reader of any category, and readers –if I ever have readers—will notice.

One of my favorite novels of all times was Mario Vargas Llosa’s La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), which makes fun of genre literature, especially the romance genre, although writer is not a novel writer but a radio scriptwriter. But Vargas Llosa’s novel has also romance: the young writer who falls in love with his aunt –7 years older than him.

What about Proust, where would his novels fall in these categories: nowhere.

Would Flaubert’s Madame Bovary be romance or anti-romance?
And Cervantes’ Don Quixote? What about García Márquez’ 100 Years of Solitude?

I think all the novels I like the most make fun of genre novels. Don Quixote got nuts because he read too many adventure/fantasy novels. Emma Bovary got mad because she read too many romance novels.

A difficult early choice on my future carrier. But maybe I am still thinking as my high-school literature teachers, and will have to see things differently.