Beth, I am a bit surprised that you are still grieved about the genre thing!
Maybe I am funny in the head, but I don’t think NiaD novels are genre books at all. They take on different subjects and settings, but it is not as though the chapter authors magically transform into genre writers – a romance writer one time, a western author the next. They arrive with the writing skills they have and, while they let their subject and setting influence them as may be, they are still notably writing “in their way”. Even though Dickens was an obvious touchpoint for 3 Ghosts, that book did not turn out any more Dickensian for all that. Twenty-four hours is not enough time to rejigger your underlying writing skill set and somehow deploy it significantly differently for a whole chapter. Rather, the time frame presses most of us down to our most basic go-to resources as writers. For someone like me anyway, it is a kind of coping against the clock.
I remember being terrified of not knowing what the genre might be when I first signed up. But in large part for the reasons above, I lost my fear of unknown genre after that. It seemed to me and still seems to me that what makes NiaD a challenge every year is not genre.*
Of course, one might just be disinterested in writing about certain things and for this reason long for a genre reveal – but that seems to me a different matter. As it was for me, and perhaps for you as well, the worry about genre was the worry that I was unprepared to write in some certain mode that (I imagined) genre books in that genre are written. But I concluded that nobody is such a chameleon, and the NiaD books just weren’t like that.
NiaD books may at some moments vamp on genre tropes, but these books are not in any of those genres. They are a kind of experimental fiction.
Greg
I say this with caution and only after due reflection, because I found this year’s NiaD particularly challenging!
Just to add to GR point, I wasn’t even sure what the genre was… stupid in hindsight, but I thought it was more horror/slasher/suspense. Even if someone told me super hero I wouldn’t have done much different. Mostly because I’m a dense, one-trick pony.
There was a bit of discussion over at pigfender.com a few years back on the subject of genre reveal, and - after a little debate - the conversation landed pretty firmly on the side of keeping it under wraps.
Everyone’s reasons were a little bit different. Mine centred on what people would do with that information:
Some people would use the knowledge to research and do a whole load of prep, which contradicts the whole “everyone is in the same boat” part of NiaD.
Some people would use the knowledge to decide not to take part, which I’m hardly going to knowingly facilitate! Plus, I’m always a little bit jealous of people in this position. An opportunity to write a chapter in a genre you’re completely unfamiliar with? That’s the NiaD event at its most challenging and most exciting, and where you learn the most about your own “voice”.
But as others have mentioned… We’re not really coming up with different genres in the truest sense. In my mind, genres are a mixture of three things: 1) a reality, 2) a story, and 3) an emotion*. In NiaD, I dictate (1) and (2) but leave (3) completely up to you. This is what GR was referring to in how NiaDs aren’t really genre fiction… that third element of deciding which emotion you want to evoke defines a lot of what you get from a genre, and that’s where the writer’s craft really comes into play!
In fact, my wife and I had some good sport before NiaD trying to reverse-engineer the genre module of your brain and made bets against each other about which way you would jump with NiaD 2017.
Maybe it’s just me, but I always feel that genre novels involve a sort of contract with the readers. Certain things they have a ‘right’ to expect to be included or exclude. And if you are not even aware of those unwritten conventions, how can you possibly fulfill your end of it?
But, yes, I suppose I can see the argument that NIAD is a genre of it’s own, so the writer is free to add a time traveling Sherlock Holmes to the contemporary paranormal romance , why not?
I totally agree! But that’s one of the nice things about NiaD. If you don’t know them, that’s not your fault or your problem. Most of the conventions you talk about are book-wide contracts not chapter or paragraph-to-paragraph contracts, so it’s on me to make sure that the chapter briefs include the necessary world features and plot markers that a reader would demand.
Well, I’d prefer you kept to the reality set up in the brief, but, yeah, you can set the tone / voice for your chapter.
Oh dear me!! I don’t think I’d fancy standing on the crumbling edge of the Abyss that’s your brain, when Choronzon the demon of the Abyss and jaysen are in joint occupation/co–residency!
Seems right to me, too, Beth. And this is really interesting to think about in relation to NiaD. Maybe we could roughly split these expectations into two kinds: expectations about a) the nature of the fictional world and what happens there and expectations about b) the sensibility of the narrative and so, in part, the manner in which things happen.
A) The World and the What
Some of these expectations about the world and what happens are broadly framed out by Rog, but the chapter authors certainly also have a hand in this also from closer-in. But it seems to me that the NiaDs thus far have been rather carefully crafted so as to have a firm foot in reality – even the superheroes don’t actually have superpowers.* (* 3 Ghosts is an exception and a cautious foray outside that basic boundary.) So, I feel like I do know a great deal about what are the expectations of this sort when working. Gremlins are out. Nice suits are in.
B) The Sensibility and the Manner
There are most definitely (unintended) shifts of style, and styling of details and character, between chapters. But far from being a deficit, I actually think this is one of the most interesting and entertaining things about reading these NiaD books – style shifting from gritty to glass-and-steel; the main character shifting from action to contemplative, from smooth to taciturn. One day the main character is a scruffy loner in a down and out flat, and tomorrow is a landed urbanite with actual friends.
But there certainly are other shifts of manner that are not so happy. In my own experience as a reader of NiaD books, the jags in sensibility/manner that stand out for me as negatives are jaggy not because they are genre-breakages, but because they offend my own sensibilities. It seems some authors will relentlessly f-bomb their chapter no matter what it is about. And one could be excused sometimes for suspecting that some authors write because they feel they don’t get enough opportunity in real life for cussing and bawling and leering. I won’t even mention the still-unforgiven spreadsheet masturbation scene. But I am pretty sure a genre tag would not kerb any of that. And so I guess I have (for good or ill) just chalked it up to the nature of the beast, because there are all kinds of people writing in all kinds of ways. So this sort of expectation is one I just expect will be flouted.
One of the interesting effects of the growth of NiaD is that there are now almost always multiple versions of chapters and so, as in my own web version of the books, I can by navigation put together a version of the book that tends this way or that in style, and, I might add, can choose to navigate around that egregious outlier chapter I don’t think my delicate sensibilities can tolerate.
In Conclusion
NiaD is the Portsmouth Sinfonia of literature! It works not because the voices magically blend so well that you get the greatest symphony performance ever. It works because it doesn’t really fit together like that but everyone is working so hard at it that it becomes something else, something you haven’t heard before – and you have to keep listening.
And just like the Sinfonia it really only works if the participants are earnestly trying to do the thing – to really play their part in the symphony. So, paradoxically, though we need to earnestly try to blindly collaborate, what makes the result “work” is not that everything did in fact fit together.
[[Disclosure: Having said all that, I feel I must confess one of my all-time favorite chapters in a NiaD is a complete, self-conscious genre buster. It was that rare exception that you can’t bring yourself to mentally reprimand though you know you should – because it was just so well done, so dead funny in the context, so unexpected and taken farther and just far enough that the lid came off.]]
Ha! Well, I can’t tell you that, because of course the bet is already on again for 2018!
Grrrrr, I hope I’m not one of the f bombers. If so I do apologize.
I do wonder if part of the proliferation of swearing in current written works is directly proportional to the proliferation of swearing in the “real world”. I do know that it is much more prevalent in today’s professional world than it was 10 years ago.
I’m obliged to make the world as easily understood as possible. “It’s just like reality” is an incredibly convenient short-cut for that. I hoped that such a well established alternate reality as the Dickensian Scrooge/Marley would’ve been as close to ubiquitously understood as “real life”, but I totally get that some would prefer that I was more adventurous in this regard.
PS did people notice our first “re-used” character?
Personally, I thought it was a pretty genius way to test the waters outside that box.
I assume the Rog character doesn’t count, b/c he was ripped from the pages of real life. Obviously. But after that I am flumoxed – guessing this is a character from the pre-GR era.
But that’s one of the nice things about NiaD. If you don’t know them, that’s not your fault or your problem. Most of the conventions you talk about are book-wide contracts not chapter or paragraph-to-paragraph contracts, so it’s on me to make sure that the chapter briefs include the necessary world features and plot markers that a reader would demand.