Genres as Crushers of Creativity
Say you go to a restaurant to order peach pie. How annoying would it be if you had to scan a long, jumbled list of appetizers and entrees and salads and side dishes and cocktails to find your pie? You want to go straight to the dessert menu. Similarly, you don’t want to scroll through online reviews of auto body shops to find a five-star dentist.
(7 Things I Learned While Writing Across Genres.)
Categorization simplifies life. The publishing industry is no exception. It has created and promoted a system to help you get right to the menu that matches your mood at the moment. Knowing, for example, that you never had a taste for fantasy and just satisfied your hunger for paranormal romance, you might head directly to memoirs.
In fact, most people read only a fraction of the available genres. Some stick to a single genre. I encountered this when someone I don’t know asked for an advance reader copy (ARC) of my novel The Die, a book about saving democracy in a wild near-future world. He’d seen it listed as science fiction. A day later, he was apologetic: “I started the first chapter, and it isn’t real sci-fi. I’m so sorry, but I’m unable to read any further.”
Of course that’s his prerogative. Likewise, an author can say, “I write exclusively small town and rural fiction.” Yes, that’s an official genre subcategory.
So what’s the problem?
It’s the constraints imposed on those of us whose minds don’t naturally think or create within tidy boxes. We chafe against the limits placed on our ability to publish books that don’t fit into a highly structured system.
Growing up, I had friends who loved mysteries, others who gravitated toward biographies. Even so, these kinds of genre distinctions were more like wavy chalk lines than the chain-link fences now constructed on the terrain of publishing. Books were, well, simply books.
The advent of print on demand and other technologies changed all that. About 4 million books are published per year. That’s an 8,000% increase over the 50,000 published in 1990! The industry has handled this deluge by expanding its system of BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) codes to encompass more than 5,000 subcategories. Notably, all fiction books fall under one of the 54 main categories.
These categories make it easier to find a book. They facilitate marketing. But at what cost to the creator?
Check out Jude Berman’s The Die here:
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I intentionally wrote The Die as a genre-defying book. It has elements of utopian fiction, political fiction, metaphysical fiction, sci-fi, and techno-thriller. I knew it would enter the marketplace tagged with three BISACs, which would fluctuate based on the whims of online algorithms, and that some categories could appear contradictory.
Your typical sci-fi reader may balk at a story that doesn’t feature space travel or aliens or a dystopian world but instead highlights a metaphysical angle. Case in point, my ARC reader. Another reader chose The Die based on its designation as a techno-thriller. Their response: “Too much philosophy, too little technology.” Ironically, that captures my intentions as the author, even if it may be a legitimate gripe by a techno-thriller fan.
All of this spells frustration. For me, writing or revising The Die to conform with one or another genre was never an option. That would have crushed the creative spark from which it came. I’d be fine calling it cross-genre, but that isn’t an official subcategory. And as I’ve just described, trying to strike a balance between its various BISACs doesn’t necessarily work well with individual readers, who tend to zero in on one category, regardless.
Even so, I don’t regret writing a book that crosses genres. It reflects how I think, how I write, and how I reimagine the world. It’s also how I like to read. My favorite books buck the system of genre in one way or another. Not that I abhor all genres. I especially welcome some of the newer ones, such as climate fiction (Cli-Fi) and hopepunk. Of course, publishing a book in a not yet fully recognized genre could be its own source of frustration.
I suspect genres may lose their stranglehold over time. That could happen if more authors assert their creativity. I mean, it’s possible. More likely, though, the industry will add so many subgenres that they begin to cancel each other out and become meaningless.
AI may juggle 10,000 subgenres in less than a second, but the human mind doesn’t work that way. Yes, it wants to find your peach pie on the dessert menu. But doesn’t it also want the freedom to write books that can find their audience, without the risk of being pigeonholed or misgenred within the expanding universe of the publishing industry?
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