Pleasing all of the people all of the time? No chance.

Earlier this month, Jean Henry Mead wrote about changes in the publishing industry and the different genres in which she wrote. I found myself agreeing with every point, especially that we should be free to shift genres if we felt like it. My earliest ‘publications’ were parodies, written as school exercises and put into the school magazine by a teacher, so I suppose from the start I was something of an experimenter when it came to style or genre. In other words, I wrote whatever the style demanded. I still love parody and I think we learn lots from trying to write like others – not all the time, of course, but as occasional writing exercises.

As a teenager, I wrote poetry – truly awful stuff about love, broken hearts, lust and all that time-wasting but so painfully-felt angst. But my first real genre, when I began to realise that writing was what I wanted to do, was drama. I wrote stage plays for adults and children. My first real taste of ‘being a writer’, though, was when the BBC accepted one of my radio plays. They broadcast several more, mostly serious, dramatic stuff, but some comedy too and finally, skits and songs for revues.

Those days, I was praised for my dialogue so it was a surprise when I started to write novels to find that the characters in them sometimes sounded less natural and realistic than those in my plays. I think writing long prose works sets up different rhythms in your mind as you write and they get carried into the dialogue, so you have to read it aloud and rewrite it to get the proper rhythmic balance.

I’m talking about different forms rather than different genres, but I think it’s relevant, to show that most of us start out just writing, rather than writing ‘crime’ or ‘romance’ or whatever. When we do fall into a particular genre – in my case, crime – that becomes what we’re expected to produce. But if readers are allowed to have short attention spans, so are we. By that I mean that the prospect of churning out book after book, each featuring the same characters in more or less the same places, is challenging in one way but claustrophobic in another. Exploring fresh ground, shifting into different centuries, past and yet to come, bending realities and multiplying dimensions, they’re all ways of releasing and refreshing your writing.

 

With the need to engage in energetic marketing nowadays, I realise that publishing novels totally different from one another in terms of genre, might be confusing for readers. Those who read The Darkness, a police procedural as dark as its title which questions ideas of bad and good, will be very surprised if they think ‘I enjoyed that, so I’ll try The Sparrow Conundrum’, only to find it’s a satirical spoof of the crime/spy genres whose sole aim is to make them laugh. So they say ‘OK, I’ll give this guy one last try’ and they read The Figurehead and find they’re in the company of shipbuilding people in Aberdeen in 1840 and that a novel that starts with a corpse on a beach ends up with the mystery being solved but with a strong romance developing at the same time.

Oh, and if they then decide to read their kids a bedtime story, choose one about a miserable fairy called Stanley who lives under a dripping tap in a bedroom, then find out it’s by the same bloke who wrote the others, they may wonder which asylum I finished up in. More importantly, they probably won’t trust me to satisfy their writing needs because I ‘lack consistency’.

The point is that, for me, there’s no difference writing any of these books or, for that matter, the dialogue between Joseph and Mary when she tells him she’s been visited by an angel and she’s pregnant. If the subject’s interesting, it absorbs me. The characters dictate the sort of things that happen; they have their own voices, their own ambitions and flaws. So whether they’re in Victorian Scotland, a contemporary police station, a space colony or sitting under a dripping tap; whether they’re murderers, lovers, saints, fairies or Klingons, they force their way into your head and you have to deal with them on their terms.

Writing is like acting – if you want the audience to suspend their disbelief, you have to do the same, you have to commit to the reality of the play you’re performing, the story you’re writing. I feel as intensely in the scene when I’m describing the antics of Stanley as when I’m watching John Grant carve his figurehead or my detective work his way through external clues and internal devils. It makes life very exciting.

WRITING IN VARIOUS GENRES

WRITING IN VARIOUS GENRES By June Shaw Do you like for an author to stick to the same genre? Do you want that person’s books to all sound similar? Would you want that person’s voice to be unique? What about if you’re an author? Do you always stick to the same genres: mystery, romance, romantic suspense, historical romance, thriller—and maybe a children’s book thrown in for good measure? If you do change genres in which you write, how has that worked for you? I’d like to be an author who writes in the same genre and keeps a series going for many years like so many mystery authors do. But that’s not what’s happening. I’ve sold three books in a series of humorous mysteries and might like to pen others in that series, but have ideas for another cozy series and began writing for that one. And my mom died, and everyone insisted I tell her inspirational story, so I did. It’s called NORA 102 ½: A Lesson on Aging Well. Before I finished that one, my youngest granddaughter said she wanted to write a book with me, so together we created HOW TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR PET GHOST. Her adolescent sisters who’re avid readers, saw their little sister’s checks rolling in for her ipad; they asked to write a book with me, too. They really enjoyed HUNGER GAMES; so did I. We’re creating a story in that genre. Okay, so even if I say I want to write in only one area, I may be wrong. I’m enjoying every genre I enter. Creating a story and individuals who live through it appeals to me, it seems, no matter the genre. How about you?

Mystery of Spider Mountain

by Jean Henry Mead

I thought about writing an autobiographical children’s book for years and finally sat down and wrote it. Solstice Publishing brought it out this week and I’m well into the second book of the Hamilton Kids mystery series. I've never had so much fun writing.

By autobiographical I mean that the characters grew up at the foot of a large hill in southern California, as I did with four younger brothers. Because the hill was inhabited by trap door spiders and an occasional tarantula that had arrived on a banana boat from Central America, I called it Spider Mountain.

My brothers and I were close in age and explored our "mountain" together. The apron was filled with purplish-blue lupines nearly all year round and about half way up the hill was Dead Man’s Tree. We called it that because a thick knotted rope hung from a lower limb that we swung on. At the end was a loop that prompted stories of horsethieves we imagined had been hanged there.

A dirt road encircled the hill at three levels but was so chocked with rocks and weeds that even a bicycle would have had difficult passage. We always wondered how the people who lived at the summit were able to reach their house, imagining everything from rock climbers to space ships and helicopters, although we’d never heard one in the area.

When I was twelve and old enough to babysit brothers who were nearly my own size, we climbed our mountain to spy on the mysterious house. What we found was a chain link fence enclosing four large vicious-looking dogs with mouths large enough to swallow a child whole. Or so we thought. It didn’t take us long to scramble back down the hill to our own house. And, of course, we never told our parents.

When I began to write I wondered again who those people were and how they arrived there. I wanted to write a mystery so I had to decide what kind of crime(s) the residents of the house had committed. And how the Hamilton kids would be able to capture them.

I thought of the Ouija board that had frightened us when we played with it at night. That’s when the spirit Bagnomi materialized to communicate with the kids via the board.

My four brothers had to be cut to two to make the story manageable. Even then they were as troubesome as my own brothers had been, so their widowed grandmother came to live with them—as mine had done. However, my grandmother didn’t have bright red curly hair like Ronald McDonald, and wasn’t interested in finding a husband. Even children’s books need humor and the Hamilton Kids’ grandmother provides that and more, along with an adopted Australian Sheppard with a penchant for chewing up furniture.

I enjoyed writing the book and hope that the second novel, The Ghost of Crimson Dawn, will be equally entertaining.