Is It Done Yet? Part 2 – Know Your Genre

Part 2 – Know Your Genre

This is the second installment aimed at helping writers know when their novel is ready to query. It's based on the presentation I made at the Las Vegas Writers Conference in April of this year, "Is It Done Yet? How to Know When Your Novel is Ready to Query"

In the previous post, I said I would talk about identifying the stages of revision, but I realized I need to back up a bit and talk about one of the most basic steps for knowing when your manuscript is ready to query.

Do you know your novel’s genre?

Surprisingly, there are a lot of writers out there querying who don’t, and this is such an important question because if you don’t know your genre, you won’t know which agents are more likely to represent your work and you may not understand the conventions of the genre. Every genre, from literary (and, yes, literary is a fiction genre) to historical fiction to thrillers has conventions that the readers of the genre are not only familiar with, they expect. Those conventions cover everything from use of language to pacing to what drives the action of your novel forward. A mystery without a crime to solve, isn’t a mystery. A romance without a relationship at its core isn’t a romance. And a literary novel that doesn’t turn on deeper aspects of human consciousness and the writer’s use of language isn’t a literary novel.

Understanding and reading in your chosen genre not only helps you find comp titles when it’s time to query, but it also helps you avoid overworked tropes and genre clichés (or use them to your advantage by subverting those tropes), and recognize other conventions that vary from genre to genre, such as the average number of pages and word count.

In addition, most agents only represent a select number of genres. Besides personal preference, agents specialize because it allows them to get to know the imprints and the editors who acquire books in those genres. They understand the current marketplace demands for those books and are familiar with the genre’s conventions. So, if you query, say, a serial killer thriller with only one murder that takes place over halfway through the book and no plot line about someone trying to stop the murder from occurring, you’re likely to receive a slue of rejections because the readers of the genre expect a fast pace, a string of murders that happen during the course of the book, and tension derived from the attempts to save the next victim, and the agent knows they’ll be hard pressed to find a publisher.

The Large Buckets for Fiction – Commercial, Upmarket, and Literary

Though some people call these terms “genre” as well, I prefer to call them “categories” so there’s less confusion.

The first question you want to answer about your novel is where it falls on the market spectrum. These are the big bucket categories of commercial, upmarket, and literary. Like genre, each of these categories has conventions, but they’re pretty straight forward. And, please remember, these are generalizations, and these terms have nothing to do with the quality of the writing.

In general:

·       Commercial is driven by the plot

·       Upmarket is driven by the characters

·       Literary is driven by the language

Commercial fiction – like Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, Suzanne Collins, Stephen King – is driven by the plot. It’s fast paced, oriented more toward what happens than character development (note: sometimes commercial fiction is also labeled "genre" fiction, which means that it conforms to the tropes of the genre rather than subverting them or commenting on them, as a reader would expect for an upmarket or literary mystery or YA or fantasy, etc).

Upmarket fiction – like Sara Gruen, Jennifer Egan, Nick Hornby, Gillian Flynn, Emma Donoghue, Khaled Hosseini – is focused on the character. There’s more emphasis on how the character reacts and changes over the course of the novel as well as an increased need for the character to be well-rounded and compelling.

Literary fiction – like Donna Tartt, Margaret Atwood, Anthony Doerr, Ian McEwen, Cormac McCarthy, Celeste Ng, George Saunders – turns on the writer’s use of language and deeper explorations of psychological and experiential meaning. (I’ll have to do a future blog post about meeting Margaret Atwood a few years ago and our conversation during which she admonished me several times that writing was “all about the language.”) Literary novels can be slower paced (though not always) because readers read for the nuances of the language and expect stories that aren’t as straight-forward as books in the other categories.

The major difference between books in these categories (and there is some overlap depending on the personal tastes of whoever is creating the list) is what drives the novel forward. Going back to the previous post, it’s the question of your novel’s central focus or question. If your novel is focused on the question of what happened, it’s likely you’re writing commercial fiction. If your novel is exploring what happened and the effect it has on the characters involved, you’re probably writing upmarket fiction. And if you’re exploring a philosophical construct or ideas about consciousness and memory, the odds are good you’re writing literary.

Genre – History, Mystery, and Romance, Oh My!

Now that you’ve figured out your category, it’s time to look at the question of genre. As I said above, identifying genre is important because it helps you narrow down your agent search and understand the marketplace.

A good place to start (though a tad overwhelming) is the BookIndustry Study Group’s listing of fiction genres. It’s a comprehensive (and exhaustive) list of genres and subgenres that’s used by the publishing industry (including Amazon) to group like books together. It’s also a good resource for writers who want to identify their genre and, in the case of large genres like SF/F, mystery, romance, and historical, their book’s subgenre as well. For example, there are sixteen subgenres for mystery including cozy, hard-boiled detective, police procedural, and historical. For romance, there are forty-seven including Regency, contemporary, Christian, military, and historical.

You’ll notice “historical” shows up as a subgenre for both mystery and romance, while there are also historical romances, historical mysteries, and historical thrillers under the historical fiction heading. The question of how you label your book goes back to the idea of what drives the forward movement of the story. If the central focus of the novel is the coming together of a couple set in Jane Austen’s time, it’s likely a Regency romance, but if the relationship is a subplot and the main focus is the protagonist’s attempt to stop a bomb exploding, it’s a thriller (think the Keanu Reeves/ Sandra Bullock movie, Speed – the main focus is the bomb on the bus, a subplot is the relationship that develops between Jack and Annie as they attempt to thwart the bomber). Always look to what the novel’s main focus is when attempting to label its genre.

So What Does All This Mean??????

What all this really boils down to is being able to identify the agents who represent the type of novel you’re writing AND giving the agents the kind of novel they want to read.

This is important because an agent won’t represent a book, no matter how well written or marketable, in a genre with which they are not familiar. When I was reading submissions for the literary agent, we received a spectacular query that identified the book as a mystery, which the agent represented. I recommended she ask for the full manuscript, which she did, but about 100 pages into the novel, I realized the novel wasn’t a mystery at all. It was a thriller, which this agent didn’t represent, and so the manuscript was rejected. Similarly, the agent represented historical fiction and was quite specific about the time period in which she was particularly interested: the American industrial revolution. We received a very good query for a novel set in the Roman era but the agent declined because it wasn’t a time period with which she was familiar enough to know if the author was getting the details right and she didn’t want to risk looking foolish to an editor by sending something that got major historical facts wrong.

What this also comes down to is sounding professional from the first line of your query letter: I am seeking representation for my upmarket contemporary women’s novel OR my commercial legal thriller OR my genre millionaire/billionaire romance OR literary amateur sleuth mystery…

In addition, knowing your specific genre is also important because it helps you find comp titles. Remember I said Amazon uses the genre/subgenre list? If you do a search for, say, bestselling dystopian fiction or bestselling cozy mysteries, you'll find comp titles to use in your query letter. 

Now that the ground work has been laid, let's take a look at the stages of revision starting with What the Writer Needs in the next post.  

If you’d like to receive a copy of my revision flow chart, please contact me at: diane.glaz@gmail.com

If you'd like more information about my editing services, please visit my website or contact me through email, Facebook, Twitter, or IG. I specialize in literary, upmarket, commercial, YA, contemporary women's, erotica, and fantasy, and have a diverse and international client base whose work has appeared on the NY Times best seller lists and Amazon top seller lists.

Twitter: @DeeGeeWriter

IG: diane.glaz

(If you follow me on IG, be forewarned: you'll see a lot of pictures of my Airedales and whisky)

Here are the links for the all the parts of this series: 

Part 1: The goal of a fully-realized novel

Part 2: Know your genre

Part 3: What the writer needs - Telling yourself the story

Part 4: What the story needs - Telling the story

Part 5: What the story (also) needs - Telling the real story

Part 6: Destabilizing and inciting incidents

Part 7: What the reader needs

Is It Done Yet? - Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts I’m doing based on a presentation I made at the Las Vegas Writers Conference in May of this year focused on how to know when your manuscript is ready to query. 

Part 1 – The Goal: A Fully-Realized Novel

Knowing when your manuscript is ready is a topic that comes up quite regularly in many writers’ groups both online and off. Most of the time, the usual advice gets offered: it’s done when you can’t stand working on it anymore; it’s done when all you can revise is punctuation; it’s done when you think it is; it’s done when your beta readers tell you it is; it’s done when you’ve done x number of revisions; it’s done when you don’t know what else to do with it.

All of these responses miss the mark because the question being asked is: when is my novel ready to query? Underneath that question is the real one: how do I know my novel will attract interest from an agent?

My answer, based on my work as a developmental/ content editor, and several years reading and editing submissions for a literary agent, is a bit more complex and based on both the writer’s understanding of their work and the demands of the publishing marketplace.

Reading for the literary agent taught me a lot. Mostly, it taught me that the vast majority of manuscripts being queried weren’t ready yet. They needed at least another revision to become what I call a fully realized novel.

A fully realized novel is one in which all the novel’s elements work together to create the dynamic forward movement that propels the characters (and the reader) from the first word to the last in a satisfying and unified manner. There is a clear and well-defined premise or central question that organizes the plot, characters, theme, setting, relevant details, structure, information flow, and sequence of scenes. In a fully realized novel, everything that is on the page is relevant and necessary to create the overall effect of the work. The overall effect of the novel is vastly greater than the sum of the individual parts. 

A movie I think does a near-perfect job demonstrating what fully realized storytelling looks like (and I’m using a movie here because they create a complete story arc in roughly two hours) is EverAfter, the Drew Barrymore and Angelica Houston retelling of Cinderella.

What I love about this movie is that nearly everything, from the costuming to set design to dialogue has an arc with a purpose and a payoff.

For example, the line, “You have been born to wealth and privilege and with that comes specific obligations” is spoken three times. First by the Queen of France and then Danielle (the Cinderella character) to Prince Henry, and lastly by the Prince himself. Each time, the line changes in meaning and it effectively shows Henry’s growth from the errant prince attempting to shirk his responsibilities, to realizing the opportunities his position might afford for helping others, to a belligerent response after Danielle’s identity as a commoner is revealed at the ball and embarrasses the prince in front of his subjects and father (in response to which, Leonardo DaVinci, this movie’s fairy godmother, says, “Hogwash” and tells the prince to get over himself; if that's truly what he believes, he doesn't deserve Danielle).

Similarly, a distinctive ruby and pearl necklace provides a subtle detail that has significant payoff. One of the royal pages took the necklace from the queen’s bedroom and gives it to the stepmother so that a meeting can be engineered for the older daughter, Marguerite, and the queen. After church, Marguerite “returns” the necklace to the queen saying it must have fallen off while she was inside. The queen rewards Marguerite’s honesty by inviting mother and daughter to the palace for a chat. At the end of the movie, when Danielle is presented to her family as the prince’s wife, she’s wearing that necklace. No mention is made of it, but the arc of that small detail is clear. In addition, there’s an earlier scene in which the baroness is buying a broach with the intention that Marguerite wear it to attract the prince’s attention. She keeps telling the seller that it needs to be bigger, to which he says, “I fear if it were any larger, she might tip over.” These are two instances where the details that are called specifically to the viewer’s attention have significance and meaning.

A fully realized novel provides the same sense of purpose, arc, and payoff for all its elements. Every scene carries a sense of the underlying premise or question, every detail relates to it, every plot point builds toward the payoff. 

A great test for whether the novel is fully realized is how easily you can write your query letter or create an elevator pitch for your novel. I think many writers struggle with their queries because their stories haven’t coalesced around a central focus that drives the narrative forward, and this is mainly a result of not pushing past the initial stages of revision to the place where the story, that connective tissue that creates relevance and unifies the narrative, emerges and becomes clear.

In Part 2, I talk about knowing your genre as an important first step in the revision process. 

If you’d like to receive a copy of my revision flow chart, please contact me at: diane.glaz@gmail.com

If you'd like more information about my editing services, please visit my website or contact me through email, Facebook, Twitter, or IG. I specialize in literary, upmarket, commercial, YA, contemporary women's, erotica, and fantasy, and have a diverse and international client base whose work has appeared on the NY Times best seller lists and Amazon top seller lists.

Twitter: @DeeGeeWriter

IG: diane.glaz

(If you follow me on IG, be forewarned: you'll see a lot of pictures of my Airedales and whisky)

Here are the links for the all the parts of this series: 

Part 1: The goal of a fully-realized novel

Part 2: Know your genre

Part 3: What the writer needs - Telling yourself the story

Part 4: What the story needs - Telling the story

Part 5: What the story (also) needs - Telling the real story

Part 6: Destabilizing and inciting incidents

Part 7: What the reader needs

Finding Meaning in the Midst of Crisis

Today is May 1st, the 47th day of lockdown for me. While I know many people are experiencing losses and grief, rampant anxiety, and a sense of numbness that affects their ability to write, I've found this to be an incredibly fertile and fruitful time in my creative life. I'm seeing so much beautiful and profound work from fellow creatives, I know I'm not alone in this.

Prior to the COVID lockdown, I was feeling fairly strung out. I truly wanted everything to stop so I could catch my breath, which feels oddly and tragically ironic now. But here we are. In a moment that is reminiscent of the aftermath of 9/11 when the world seemed to be upending itself and we stood on a precipice of change without any indication of where things would go from here. I remember the same questions from artists, writers, and other creative people -- how do I keep working? how does the work I've been doing have resonance in this moment? do I keep going with the same projects, change them to reflect this new moment, or start something new? how do I keep myself from feeling despair?

This moment has taken me back to what is essential about creating art, to a guiding principal I admit I haven't thought much about in recent years as I've gotten wrapped up in the pursuit of publication for my novel: that writing in particular, and art in general, is a way to express what it means to be a particular human being in a particular moment in time. This has always been my true north.

I've also noticed, in the way we have turned to the arts in the midst of our various shelter-in-place orders, we are looking for these points of connection. It seems as if we are saying, tell me about your experience of this moment and help me understand my own.

This has always been the power of the arts and why I have long thought the emphasis on STEM at the expense of the arts is short-sighted and ignores the very powerful human need for connection as a way to understand and process. While the arts will never find a cure for COVID-19, we turn to the arts to make sense of our world. We create art to make sense of our own reality. In this moment, the arts enrich our lives with beauty, they provide a respite for our over-stressed minds, give us a way to express and process our distress and communicate our pain and confusion and fear and hope. Most importantly, they give us a language in which to be human together.