Dearest Editor, On agency web sites, I often read that a writer should know the market for his genre – know what is getting published – what is selling. However, I’ve also read agent interviews where the agent advises that it takes up to two years to get a manuscript published and no one can anticipate the up and downs of the market in the meantime, so don’t worry about what is getting published today. You recommend reading the classics to improve one’s writing. If I am a disciplined writer, what percentage of my time should be spent reading other authors and specifically, other authors in my genre?—Snoopy
Dearest Snoopy: 50% reading, 50% writing, 50% on the rest of your life. That’s the accepted formula.
As far as keeping an eye on what’s selling. . .yeah. The distinction here is between market and audience.
The market is whatever’s going on out there, and the reason to watch that is to jump on the bandwagon. Is everyone else writing YA vampire romance? Quick—write some YA vampire romance and grab yourself a piece of that pie! Is everyone else writing gritty MG urban fantasy? Get with the program—rap out some MG children doing crack in abandoned warehouses! Chop, chop, people. Time’s a-wasting!
The problem, as so many professionals are kindly pointing out, is that bandwagons come and go, while books still predictably take their own sweet time to pull themselves together and trundle on out to their waiting public. And the more heavily we as a species depend upon faster and faster technology for our likes and dislikes, the faster and faster our bandwagons are going to move.
Your audience, on the other hand, is a fairly identifiable substance.
Are you writing for the disenchanted, the disinherited, the disillusioned and depressed? In the 1960s that meant writing dark, deadpan, carefully-researched, detailed, and realistic Swedish crime novels. In the 1970s that meant writing dark, deadpan, detailed, realistic futuristic sci fi about utopias that didn’t work out. In the 1980s that meant writing dark, deadpan, detailed, realistic interviews with vampires. In the 1990s that meant writing dark, realistic, weird, violent urban fantasy about capitalist dreams that didn’t work out, sometimes with vampires. In the 2000s that meant writing dark, realistic, sometimes weird violent porn. In the 2010s according to the some predictions, that means writing dark, violent, pornographic, weird Swedish crime novels.
This is because those of us who identify ourselves as disinherited and disillusioned want validation that our lives—in concrete, realistic terms—really are as bad as we think they are. Even Swedish.
On the other hand, are you writing for the hopefully-inclined and sexually-mature female, the emotional, the fantasy-minded, the middle-income, the dreamer daughter of ordinary businessmen and housewives? In the 1960s that meant writing light-weight magazine stories about women named Kim and men named David who meet on a bus. In the 1970s that meant writing Jane Eyre-based triangles about small, jealous, passively-indignant young women in love with (and servitude to) tyrannical bullies who appear to be succumbing to the advances of sexy vixens. In the 1980s that meant writing about spunky young women in love with men who hit and “forcefully seduce” (this is called rape) them. In the 1990s that meant writing about intelligent, spunky young women in love with hyper-jealous older men involving a lot of lying to each other and a touch of soft-core porn. In the 2000s that meant writing about tough-minded, sexy vixens in love with the intelligent, principled arch-nemeses of the amoral cads, with a bit more than a touch of soft-corn porn. In the 2010s according to RWA, that means writing pretty much anything as long as it’s about two people falling in love. (Preferably with porn.)
This is because those of us who identify ourselves as hopeful and sexually-mature females want validation that our lives—our eternal quests for the sexual passion/true love we were promised as little girls—really are going to work out the way we expect them to.
Are you writing for children? In the 1960s that meant good-bad realistic morality tales like The Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, Little Women, Roald Dahl’s fantasial morality tales under the guise of dark humor, and clever fantasy like Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. In the 1970s that meant Tolkein-based fantasy like Prydain and Narnia, sci fi like Madeleine L’Engle, and and realistic children’s stories like All-of-a-Kind Family, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Judy Blume’s exploratory realistic YA (a brand-new genre). In the 1980s that meant the brand-new genre MG rather than children’s fiction, in exploratory realistic stories for younger kids like Judith Viorst’s The Tenth Good Thing About Barney and light-weight pseudo-realistic series fiction like Sweet Valley Twins. In the 1990s that meant retro fantasy like Margaret Wise Brown and Amelia Bedelia and hyper-commercialized fantasy like Harry Potter and movie tie-ins like Disney. In the 2000s that meant, um, Harry Potter and movie tie-ins. In the 2010s, god help us, let it not be YA shock-value bandwagon dragged into the MG arena.
This is because children, by and large, are children and need both fantasy and reality to validate their experiences of this unbelievably surreal event you all call “life.” And because they are also, as newbies to the party, sitting ducks for advertising—not to mention PTSD.
Now, you can analyze these lists and see where the market moves. Over the past five decades realistic fiction has pretty much veered from so-called “safe” topics to so-called “edgy” or what the authors would like to think of as “ultimate unsafe” topics. (Although this is an illusion, since there are always topics too abhorrent for even the worst of us—super-punk Sid Vicious was grossed-out by a young woman who brought her abortion to the bars with her in a plastic bag.) Why the move toward unsafe? What is attractive about writing unsafe fiction? We actually hashed this out in a discussion of YA literature last week, so I won’t repeat it. We have our reasons. (And our therapists.)
Fantasy-type fiction, on the other hand, has become increasingly wildly creative, from Dr. Seuss’s wacky striped pod people and Maurice Sendak’s ground-breaking Wild Things (talk about dark and edgy! those darn things want to EAT you and were, in fact, based on Sendak’s intimidating Old World relatives, of which I’ve had a few myself) to a vast, sweeping panorama of everything from urban/horror/extreme to sci fi—including historical and futuristic, with and without time travel—to mythical/paranormal/after-life to alternate reality to bizarre mixes of any and all of the above and now moving into multimedia through ebooks.
Yes, the drift in this case has also been toward shock value and previously inappropriate content. But not all of it. A lot of the exploration in fiction going on these days is purely for the sake of creativity, much as the Moderns of the 1910s and ’20s screwed with accepted literary modes of their day just because they realized they could. (For the record, the core Moderns were also into shock value—when the virginal Stephens sisters, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, first met the men of their future Bloomsbury Group around 1905, one asked about a stain on Vanessa’s dress and another answered drolly, “Semen.”)
And throughout the ages, while you’ve always been able to make a nice buck if you just imitate a trend-setter faithfully enough, you’ve also always been able to make an even nicer literary impact if you can dig deep into your understanding of craft and literature and creativity and the connection between humans that lives in stories to set your own trend.
Of course, that’s what Stieg Larsson did. And you saw what happened to HIM.
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