October 2024 newsletter: Confession time: I read outside of the speculative fiction genre. Sometimes, whole series at a time. I know, I’m probably the Amazon algorithm’s worst nightmare. My ‘also-reads’ are scattered like multicolored pepper across a Caesar salad. And honestly, I suspect many of you are guilty of the same.
Take Georgette Heyer, for example. I’ve devoured every Regency Romance she wrote. She pretty much invented the genre. I started collecting her books in the pre-Kindle era, so libraries and musty second-hand bookstores were my hunting grounds. But I don’t stop there. Mysteries? Not the cozy kind—no, I like a little more tension. I’m all about police procedurals. I’ve read every Michael Connelly’s Bosch novel and have watched both TV series multiple times. And David Baldacci, Lee Child’s Reacher books, and John Grisham…
And still, my ‘pepper’ of genres grows.
But what ties all of these seemingly random choices together? Amazing characters! That’s the common thread, the reason authors like Heyer, Connelly, Baldacci, and Child are at the top of their game. Every writer dreams of creating characters so compelling that readers are hooked from the first page, can’t put the book down, and are left hungry for more when it’s over.
I came across a quote recently in Writer’s Digest Magazine from Tess Callahan that speaks to this beautifully. She writes, “Let yourself fall headlong into the fictional dream of your characters. Sit in the backseat and notice where they take you. Don’t worry if they are terrible drivers, if they get lost, or total the car.”
Yes, she writes in the literary fiction genre. Maybe not mention it as a genre around friends who only read ‘good’ books. They can be a bit touchy on the subject.
Unless you’re a writer, you might not know that each genre has a set of things the ‘average reader’ of the genre expects to find in the story. These expectations become constraints for the writer. As readers, we internalize these, so as writers, we can’t escape them. However, constraints can actually increase creativity. It’s like our brain needs structure before it can break boundaries and invent new realities and ways of looking and doing.
Here’s Tess Callahan again in a short TEDx talk on creativity and constraint.