I’ve had a lot of thoughts about genre bouncing around my head for days, along with the song “Ida Red” by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, because I’ve gotten hooked on Andrew Hickey’s podcast, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. In this impressively researched series, Hickey shows the influences that lead to the genre(s) we know as rock and roll. He’s able to trace artist to artist and song to song through answer songs, covers, and reimaginings. Over and over, Hickey points to the constant inspiring force of musicians and singers jamming together or changing and reforming groups across all kinds of musical genres. And because my thoughts always turn to books, eventually, I started to wonder how Hickey’s representation of genre influences could be mapped over to fiction…and what we might be able to do with that kind of thinking.
The way we think about genre—as listeners and readers—feels very stratified. We like what we like, which sometimes leads to personal rules about what we listen to or read and what we don’t bother with. Think about it. When you look for music or a book, you probably start by looking for a genre or an artist/writer you like and look for something similar. Me, I like mysteries, but I loathe cozy mysteries. I am all over historical fiction (except for anything set before the Roman Republic).
When we decide to challenge our reading habits, we often talk about it in terms of broadening our genre horizons. When we get bored of the same old story, we often look for something pretty different. Which brings me back to 500 Songs. Along with tracing musical influences, Hickey pays close attention to how the music industry exerted its own influences as people either tried to find the next big thing or recreate a previous hit so that they could profit from it. Publishing isn’t too different from the music industry in this regard. If you think about it, you can probably remember some bookish fads or recall the moment when a new genre suddenly appeared. How many vampire books were written in the wake of Interview With the Vampire? Or all the love triangles that broke out across Young Adult like a rash after The Hunger Games? These read-alikes are partly why I see blurbs that compare a book to another recent wildly popular book as a personal red flag, personally.
This isn’t to say that you have to constantly challenge your reading tastes. There are few things better than a book that you’ve read before and loved or picking up a book in a genre you adore. What I want to push back against are things that are too similar to what came before. I want is for the publishing and music and movie industries is for them to take a chance on stories and songs and such that innovate and push the boundaries of genre. I want novelty and originality. To get those things, I want us all—industry and consumer alike—to start thinking about genre boundaries as porous rather than solid, the way that this genre map from Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series draws things.
So, how do you find those books that push the genre boundaries? Weirdly enough, blurbs can help a lot here. Not the blurbs that call something the next Gone Girl, of course. Instead, look for blurbs that compare the book in question to authors in different genres or at least different corners of the genre. Ask a librarian or a bookseller for a book that they had a hard time deciding which shelf to put it on. Read author interviews and look for their influences—or go to their social media and look at who they’re reading.
And once you’ve done that, come back and here and tell me what you found. You know I’m always adding to my never-ending to-read list.