DAY TWENTY

 

"I was looking back to see if she was looking back to see if I was looking back at her". 

Looking Back. Johnny Watson.

 

Genre. Fashion. What the market wants. It's just as well nobody reads this blog, as what I'm about to say is not likely to earn me many friends I suspect.  Go into any bookshop, or seeing as they've all but disappeared from most towns, supermarket, and take a look at the paperbacks on offer. What you'll find is lots of books with similar titles, similar cover designs, similar content.  

 

YA (young adult) is a big thing, and lest we forget, an invention of the marketing department. Magic and/or vampires will be involved. 

 

There'll be lots of romance books, many of them set in the Second World War for some reason. And then they'll be our Kitty from't mill falling for the saturnine but ultimately deceitful charms of young Mr. Harrowby, t'mill's owner's son, before finding true love with the quiet boy who sat behind her at school. Which she left aged thirteen.

 

On the other hand you'll find bright savvy young women who have great jobs, great friends, great, independent, lives but still wonder if there is something missing as they swipe left and right to negotiate another round of dating. Or they'll be borderline pyschopathic techie young women with dramatic revenge fantasies needing to be fulfilled.

 

Spies and ex-military tough guys will be murdering the right-thinking world's enemies without compunction and performing other inhuman(e) feats. There'll be people bewailing their childhoods - though I think that's been in decline. There'll be children's books (you'll find no argument from me there, more the merrier). And if you're lucky you'll find something by one of those lucky authors who though not fitting into any obvious genre, a Booker prize winner say, has become popular nonetheless.

 

Wonderful, you may be thinking. All that harmless entertainment for all those people who like to read these sorts of books.  

Well I beg to differ. And I fail to understand. I particularly fail to understand the people who write to these formulas. Well, I suppose I can understand people who are fans and have gained a great deal of pleasure from a certain genre wanting to emulate works they have enjoyed, but to stick with it for book after book? I don't get that. I saw someone - a person in their thirties by the looks of it - declaring they had written 60 books. Oh, come on. Surely some quality control required there?

 

Nor do I understand what satisfaction might be gained from using tropes which other people have invented. Surely the aim of a writer should be to invent tropes that others might follow, to be original, in other words. Again, I can understand an homage to a certain style, or a pastiche, but I can't understand why anyone pretending to the name of author could cold-bloodedly and unreflectingly jump on the back of a bus that is already full with other people going the same way.

I'm not so much knocking it as professing my ignorance and inability to understand the motivation, the emotion behind it. If it's just for money, or hoped for fame, or for the satisfaction of having produced something - well at least the last reason isn't venal. This whole blog is essentially about encouraging people to make things, anything, rather than just be consumers so I can't really contradict those who have made something, even if not to my taste. Nor do I want to criticise people who have something that they feel they need to say, or whose primary interest is to entertain others. But still, I have problems with it. It's the same problem I had when I first encountered social media: Everyone seemed to be repeating back slightly modified versions of what everyone else had just said. It compeletely baffled me.

 

I've returned to social media recently to discover people proudly stating in their profiles 'I am a YA writer', or 'I write vampire fiction' - along with ten million others. I recently saw someone - a writer supposedly - appealing to be told what the latest trends in the market were so she could plan her next novel. How could anybody do that and still maintain their self-respect is beyond me.

There are of course some good writers who happen to write genre fiction but are able to push its creaky framework and say something a little more transcendent. John le Carre is as much about a decay at the heart of a post-colonial British Establishment as he is about spies. There are some genres which also lend themselves to a broader perspective. Science Fiction has often been a vehicle for penetrating reflections on the nature of our species. Some detective fiction can be psychologically authentic and illuminating. 

But I am having to think hard for examples. Most genre fiction, like most art forms, tends towards the trite, the derivative, the popular, or should that be populist. There's no getting away from it. I suspect this has always been the case. The Mozart  and Reubens clones have simply been lost to the mists of time, musicologists and art historians leaving the genuines Masters standing unmoved as the tide of fashion recedes.

 

What it comes down to I suppose is a distinction between writing as a craft and as an enduring journey of discovery and invention, and writing as an industry which transmits words for transient entertainment; books as a life enhancing art form and one of the best repositiories of human knowledge and culture ever invented, and books as a commodity measured by their contribution to a publisher's bottom line.

It would be good if we could find a way not to conflate these very different things. Then I might be able to respect both.

Now, shall we talk about how my childhood devotion to Marvel superheroes has been completely traduced by the 'Marvel Cinematic Universe'?

 

Picture Credit: Face Reflected in a Mirror. J. Alden Weir, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons