About seven years ago, I decided to write a novel about my grandfather’s experience in World War Two. I knew a very little bit about it: only that he’d been a prisoner of war, and that he’d escaped the Germans by jumping off a train somewhere in northern Italy. I’d also been told that he was shot (which I later learned was actually a shrapnel wound), but that was about it.
When I finally asked my grandmother if she could tell me anything about it (my grandfather passed away before I was old enough to care), I learned that his story was a great deal more interesting than I’d ever realized. She gave me a brief summary that had been submitted to the Army, detailing his experience. I took those eight pages and embarked on the monumental task of piecing the entirety of the story back together in novel form.
Earlier this year, I submitted an excerpt of my novel to a local writing group I’d been a part of, dubbing it “historical fiction.” Since starting the book, I’d used the term “historical fiction” to identify the genre, not really knowing how else it might be classified. But when I submitted the piece to the writing group, one of my cohorts suggested that the book was not, in fact, historical fiction, but creative non-fiction, or narrative non-fiction. I’d heard of creative non-fiction before, but the truth is that I didn’t really know what it was. It had always seemed to me that creative non-fiction was more applicable to stories that didn’t take place at a significant time in history, that for something to be creative non-fiction, one simply had to take actual events and characters and embellish a bit on the action and dialogue. Of course, that was exactly what I’d done with my own story except that mine did take place during a significant historical event, yet the historical aspect didn’t seem as important to my friend when she was considering the genre.
“But then, what is historical fiction?” I asked.
I don’t remember her answer, except that I knew I didn’t fully understand it. But since she was more of an expert than I was, I thought I should go with her guidance. I began to refer to my work as creative non-fiction.
In mid-July, I attended my first creative writing residency in pursuit of an M.F.A. I used excerpts from the novel as my workshop samples, eagerly awaiting the feedback I’d receive that would no doubt make the piece much better than I could have done on my own.
When I arrived, my new friends and colleagues had a tendency to identify each other by the pieces we’d submitted, since that was the only familiarity we had with each other at the time. I summarized my work to someone, and when she realized which piece it was, she said, “Oh, right! That was the historical fiction piece.”
“Yeah,” I said, suddenly confused, but wanting to sound like I knew what I was talking about. “It’s more like a creative non-fiction piece, but that’s the one.”
“Creative non-fiction?” she said. “Interesting. Why do you call it that? I really thought it was historical fiction.”
Me, too, I thought. My attempt to cover up my ignorance had failed, and I was forced to explain that it had been suggested to me by a trusted friend in the industry, but that I didn’t really understand the difference.
Similar variations of this conversation took place throughout the first part of the week, until I was thoroughly confused, frustrated, and a bit concerned that I didn’t know the genre of my novel. How would I ever choose the right agents or publishers to send the manuscript to if I didn’t even know how to market the piece by its genre? Would my novel be doomed to unclassifiable purgatory?
Fortunately, or so I thought, there was a workshop later in the week having to do with the fictionalization of actual events. We were given examples to read, primarily by Joyce Carol Oates and John Shepard. They were stories about not unfamiliar events – the Chappaquidick incident involving Ted Kennedy, and the Chernobyl disaster. The stories told the lives of real people, but the names were changed and some of the event details ever so slightly altered for obvious legal reasons.
“So would these be classified as historical fiction or creative non-fiction?” someone asked.
“Well,” said the facilitator, “it depends. They could be either.”
“Depends on what?”
The facilitator went on to hem and haw about the nuanced differences between these two genres, but in the end, there was no definitive answer. I was somewhat devastated. That seminar had been my glimmering light of hope at the end of the uncertain tunnel down which I’d been charging aimlessly for too long. How could this be? Did no one know the difference between historical fiction and creative non-fiction?
“I think what you really have,” someone else suggested, “is a memoir.”
Great. Now I have historical fiction, narrative non-fiction, and a memoir all rolled into one. As if writing the book wasn’t hard enough, now I had to figure this out. It was enough to make me want to give up. But as a writer, I get that feeling a lot, and I’ve grown used to overcoming it.
As I let the story stew for a few days, I began to explore the question of genre in general. Once upon a time – and it wasn’t that long ago – there were only a few ways that books might be categorized. There was romance, horror, sci-fi/fantasy, literary fiction, among others. If someone said the genre of a particular book, most people would understand how they meant to categorize it.
But since then, and I suspect largely because so many of these genres have been given bad names by terrible stories published within them, a number of subgenres have sprung up, making the jobs of publishers and agents slightly easier while giving new writers just one more thing to agonize over.
Another example is my first book, Dark Island. To sum it up, the novel is basically a ghost story. But the term “ghost story” more than likely gives people the wrong idea. While the first draft ten years ago may have been only a ghost story, the book has evolved to be much more about human struggles and the metaphorical prisons that we sometimes find ourselves in without ever having realized that we were headed down the wrong path. This is not a ghost story, yet the existence of the ghost in the story, and the significant role it plays, weakens its contention for simply being literary fiction. Some might say that it falls under the category of “fabulism”, a category so new that no one has even bothered to make a Wikipedia entry about it. Others still want to put it into sci-fi/fantasy, even though the only thing fantastical about the story is the ghost. Still others want to put it under a label with the supernatural, which wouldn’t be altogether inaccurate, but it would ultimately miss the point, especially when querying agents.
The young adult genre is also going through a major evolution, which has most writers and probably most readers a bit confused. Are YA books something that must include magical realism, fabulism, or science-fiction? Are they really targeting the ages of seventeen to twenty-two, or is the net cast much wider than that? Publishers, of course, want YA novels that will start with young adults but eventually appeal to (regular?)adults, but there are many YA readers who are much younger than seventeen, primarily because the language of YA has come to be a bit less sophisticated. Sophisticated language, then, can separate a novel out of the YA category, even though that is where it actually belongs. (It’s also worth noting that YA novels have tragically become something that the intellectual world of writers tends to shun– something that wasn’t always the case when the writing wasn’t so juvenile.)
So what is one to do? How can a writer be comfortable classifying his or her work? There aren’t any good answers to this. The first is simply to pick a genre that feels right to you, and stick with it. You may make an erroneous query here or there because of it, but if you’ve polished a novel enough to send queries, you ought to know it pretty well. Trust your instincts.
Second, find a mentor or trusted colleague who can help you to evaluate your own work. Then find another. Get as many industry people to read your work as possible, and take their feedback. Some of them will offer genre advice and some of them won’t, but simply hearing their thoughts and criticisms will help you to understand where your work belongs.
Finally, don’t stress about it more than you have to. Unfortunately, writers need to be marketers these days, but don’t ever forget that marketing is your second job, not your first. If an agent reads your manuscript and thinks it’s marketable enough to take on, he/she is not likely going to simply turn you away because you’ve mislabeled the genre in a query letter. If the agent really doesn’t dabble in the actual genre of your book, they will tell you where your work belongs and some of the more helpful ones may even give you further direction on better venues to which you might send your query.
Ultimately, I’ve decided to go back to my original classification of historical fiction for the piece about my grandfather. I chose this primarily because the characters are becoming more and more fictionalized, having only eight pages and an emotionally-reserved primary source to work from, and because the places involved are long gone now, with no pictures or descriptions to provide me context. I’m sure some will still say that what I’ve got is creative non-fiction or a memoir, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about being a writer, it’s that everyone’s a critic. Some people will tell me that I have something other than what I have. Some people will tell me that I’ve written a fantastic piece while others will call that same piece atrocious. There can be very little objectivity with the creatively-written word, and so when push comes to shove, the only thing a writer can really do is to follow his heart. After all, that’s usually what brings us to fill in so many blank pages in the first place.
And more on publication next week from Sorina Higgins.