I wrote my first novel that was published during grad school. Here I was thinking I was writing the ultimate love story, but it turns out it was a horror novel. The protagonist Michael’s wife and kid are dead, but still living with him. I was exploring a space of grief, not letting things go and the harm that can come from that. Okay, there may have been a demon involved (the harm that comes). Still, when it sold to a horror imprint, 47North I was a bit taken aback.
I was very lucky it sold to a horror imprint because I was welcomed into a really wonderful community of supportive writers, wonderful conversations around genre, writing, history, and plain outright geekery and commonality as it seems everyone I met had grown up on the same stuff I loved from Poe to horror movies to Oz. I’m not kidding, Baum’s books are absolutely disturbing, creepy wonderful books.
But I don’t sit down to write in a specific genre. When I am writing, I’m usually sitting down with a question, a wisp of an idea. In the case of Harrowgate, I was dealing with fear. I love my husband and kids so much, what would I do to keep them with me if they were taken from me? I wanted to explore love set at the edge of life and death. What followed was a very claustrophobic ghost story, with its own worldbuilding and rules.
When I sat down to write my next book, I was having lunch in a kitchen nook with Toni Ann Johnson a friend who knows me very well and, with Harrowgate out to editors with my agent, I was noodling what to write next. She said, matter of factly, “You’ve always loved old movies, why don’t you write about that?” I started talking about my love for the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, and I checked out biographies of my favorites from the library. Edith Head. Barbara Stanwyck. Cary Grant. It was Cary Grant’s sad story, his long relationship with Randolph Scott and the looming Hollywood closet that generated Alterations.
The skills from different genres only help each other. My worldbuilding skills from Harrowgate came in handy as I drove my main characters, Rose and Adriana through late 1930s Hollywood. It was important to ask questions like: what was that part of Santa Monica Boulevard like in 1939? (a dirt road apparently) and what did the Formosa Café serve? What was it like as a woman working at a studio filled with men? How was Paramount laid out? I also explored the operational reality of being in a Boston marriage, living with the love of your life and when exactly the hammer would come down that made that more difficult. Sadly, Grant’s story yielded a lot of that—it was when the studio threatened that he drop Randy or lose his job that he chose his job. My mom’s great Aunt lived with Mary the love of her life in 1920s Jacksonville Florida as part of a conservative Catholic family, and the couple lived happily together for the rest of Mary’s life. I wanted to explore that space of love when met with societal norms, and how some choices might be outright, but others are a slow erosion.
The book also takes place in 1990s Baltimore which was its own research tunnel. Alterations came together nicely and I’m quite proud of it, but I realized that the nongenre world doesn’t really understand how a horror writer can write…not horror. I’m always hesitant to use the word “literary” for realism, because it implies horror isn’t literature. I’d argue that some of the finest prose I’ve ever read is in horror: Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, Stephen Graham Jones, Jesmyn Ward (yes, Sing, Unburied Sing was released as realism but that was honestly the best horror book I read that year). There is this inherent ghettoization when it comes to horror writing. You tell an ordinary person you write horror and you get the nose wrinkle and the change in tone. Maybe that’s why horror folks are so kind. We’re all on the margins, so there’s no room for a notion of hierarchy. We write the books we love and come to each other with enthusiasm rather than ranking.
But here I am with a new book I love very deeply out in a different world of promotion. Being known for horror leads folks to jump to conclusions over this book. Its cover, which is meant to evoke sadness of a time gone by, a bit of regret has evoked the words, “creepy!” from people who don’t understand this is something else entirely. I can’t rely on my comfortable horror community for the space in which to promote this book, and I’ve hired a publicist. I do have so many friends who are writers of realism who have been most helpful, but the worlds are completely different and have different operational realities.
There is an idea of sticking to one genre and creating a “brand” but honestly, I can’t command myself to write a story about a specific thing in a specific genre. My stories come from a different space, from questions I have or feelings I’m trying to evoke. And it’s usually the story that decides its genre. Harrowgate chose horror. Alterations couldn’t be anything but realism.
After writing my second horror novel The Collective (out now from Writ Large Press) about a cult, a demon and the film industry, I sat down to write a supernatural story that explored a marriage through the lens of Alzheimer’s. I had an idea that a couple could reach each other on a different plane when a diminishing memory pulled them apart…I was super excited about that angle. But the story came out over many drafts and characters and points of view and reorganized and told itself as realism. If I tried to wedge the supernatural on it, it would have rebelled. That liminal space for memory simply became…memory. And I love that book and it’s fully realized and I’m proud of it, realist though it is.
I told my Cal State LA fiction students that our drafts are like children. Whatever our influence, they are fully their own people. It’s up to us to help them become the best version of themselves they can be.
Even though I feel like I’m writing about the same stuff over and over: questions of love, relationships, friendships, “branding” eludes me as my stories dash between genres. This will definitely not lead me to fame and fortune but I have to say, with everything going on in the world and life, my writing life is quite content as I poke at new questions, ask questions of my characters, and write forward.
One of my mentors, Rob Roberge said, “If you show up, and work hard enough, and listen, your novel will make itself apparent to you.” I quote that to my students all the time, and I live by it. But now, as science fiction short stories are working their way into my life (I’m writing a collection and have published one in Asimov’s and one in Analog.) I’d likely add: if you tell the story what it’s going to be, it will laugh and go in another direction. Just write.
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