The Writers Community

I found myself plotting a manor mystery yesterday, and continued it today, and I am having just so much fun.

How do you feel about writing genre fiction, especially fiction in a very specific niche like the manor mystery or gothic romance? When you have a narrowed-down genre, do you want to keep within the tropes of it, or mix it with another genre, or subvert those tropes? Or do you prefer not to think about genre at all?

Since manor mysteries are all about messing with your expectations (as long as it doesn't ruin the brain teaser) I expect this will be the most genre-loyal of any of my subgenre-specific stories. If it was a sword & sorcery story, I would not be able to resist making the lone barbarian warrior into the villain.

Signed up for NaNoWriMo! ...Did you? Who's for it, who's against it, does it matter?

Read this brief article (on FWD/Forward) about how odd it is to read "She couldn't breathe. Her heart skipped a beat" when you actually HAVE been in that situation and it's a little more crippling than feeling a little shocked at the time. There's a lot of descriptive shorthand and embellishment like this that authors use - that I use, too. I keep thinking I should pay more attention, and sometimes during re-read and edit catch really embarrassing mistakes that just sounded right at the time.

The point of the article was that people who have not had these conditions don't realize how odd it is to use them to describe something completely different. The same criticism could extend to a lot of other examples. In some situations I suppose it's obvious it's meant metaphorically - "the realization hit him like a sledgehammer" doesn't actually mean the character's skull is suddenly split - but then again it's easy to overuse gestures such as blushing, quirking an eyebrow, tapping a foot, frowning and sighing when people usually don't blush all that often. It's hard to find some other indication for embarrassment, scepticism, impatience or displeasure even though these states manifest in a lot of different ways.

I guess there should be a healthy balance between metaphor and reality, and a good visual and kinetic idea of how the character's emotional reaction shows in her body language/reactions other than just applying trope gestures (though, when appropriate and not overused, some of those can be good too). I never tap my foot when I'm impatient or irritated. Sometimes I swing it. Sometimes I tap a pen on the table. Mostly, then, I frown, twist my mouth a little and type angrily/walk faster, or begin shouting. When I'm shocked by a turn of events, everything goes a little hazy while the new facts sink in; I can't muster the brain focus to move or act. I do breathe, as it happens automatically. My heart rate might be affected, might not - I can't tell, I'm too busy being shocked. Oh, and hah, notice how we keep saying "shock" and "panic" when those medical states are a lot more intense than the states we often use those words for? 

Anyway, food for thought - editing thought, anyway. I'm not going to worry about ANY of this stuff while writing next November. The reason I find NaNoWriMo fab is that it forces you to get the bulk of the writing done, after which it's all just editing, cutting, adding and molding until it all actually works. 

This is rather long and I apologize for that in advance. But it's a community for talking about writing, isn't it? So there. 

After 15 years of writing, I'd say I'm definitely a writer, even if all I've published is one minor article in a local newspaper, a few reviews in a super-indie publication and tons of fanfic online. I've never really taken my writing seriously enough to try to make money off it, but I'm going for it at last this year for National Novel Writing Month. 

I know - NaNoWriMo is usually for bad writing, but it's a good excuse to really work hard every day and get a first draft done from start to finish. I have a lot of research and planning to do first, even though all I'm going to attempt is a romance novel. I figured it's got to have a better chance of being published, considering the huge percentage of the book market romance novels dominate, and from what I've seen Harlequin doesn't exactly mind "beginner" errors. 

I got a hold of some romance novels for researching the genre, though before I got them I had already got excited and begun to plot - a plot that I now see I can' t possibly use... Believe it or not, I had never before read a bona fide category romance novel. My first one was Linda Lee Guhrke, and I found it so-and-so, but having since read two others I now see that in its genre it was quite brilliant. There are very clear rules and there seems to be a formula for plot points that I intend to calculate by pagecount next. I want to do the genre justice. It's actually interesting to write such specific genre fiction, as the challenge is to make it original and still make it fit. 

I face several challenges in writing this:

- I will want to improve on the clichés, and that's a difficult balance to keep - I don't want to sound like I'm mocking the clichés the reader is likely to love. 
- I really hate the way the heroes are written. I don't find them attractive at all. I don't know how I'll be able to write one of these silly characters and still like him. 
- The man will have to be stronger and more capable than the woman, and that needs to be one of his appeals. This offends my feminist sensibilities somewhat. 
- I will have a lot of doing trying to stop myself from subverting the clichés (my first urge is to write this about a middle-aged overweight couple who are so mundane it hurts, and show the beauty of their love while they munch on industrial cookies on their tacky 80s pattern sofa).  

Pretty much the only thing I'm sure I can ace are the sex scenes, and even there I think I'll need to hold myself back a little. There's also the problem that I'm not at all used to writing novel-length fiction; I tend to peter out long before 10,000 words. The longest I've written so far was 45,000 words. 

All this makes me think I should just write the novel I want to write; it's got more of a chance to be actually finished, but pretty much zero chance of being sold, despite probably being a better book. 

What do you think I should attempt? Mundane romance (this is the idea that fires me up) or something I can actually sell?