I’m crazy busy, still revising this site, writing, babysitting my new baby niece and all manner of other things. So rather than come up with my own post today, I’m sharing other folks’.
Let’s start with Crimesistahs, where Angela blogs about the latest survey from Sisters in Crime . It’s amazing what information you can find on the market if you just look around. I hadn’t realized the mystery was genre non grata until I read this post. From now on I write thrillers, dammit.
Next stop is Sarah Weinman’s blog. She steals a bit from an essay on suspense written by Thomas Perry for LA Weekly.
Suspense isn’t a pleasant sensation. We go to great lengths to manage our lives in ways that will keep us from having to go through periods of uncertainty — particularly when it’s prolonged, and when the stakes are high. But in reading fiction, especially a novel, we crave this sensation of increasing tension, and the higher the stakes, the better. We love the experience of sitting somewhere in perfect safety with a book while some character serves as our surrogate in facing a world full of danger. What we’re enjoying is growing excitement, followed by a tantalizingly delayed cathartic ending. It’s a quality of all good fiction, and it’s why the reader keeps turning the pages.
My response is exactly! I know that’s why I read and the experience I hope to engender in my work.
Weinman also posits that Perry is correct when he speculates that the literati aren’t enamored with suspense is “perhaps because [suspense] seems to stimulate emotion rather than intellect: It makes readers care rather than think.”
Isn’t that the mission of all genre fiction? To bring the reader into the world of the protagonists and make them feel what the characters feel? And perhaps that’s why romance is the most denegrated genre of all, since the character’s feelings play such a prominent role in the development of the story.
And finally, Patricia Woodside blogs about finding your literary voice.
Hope you enjoyed this mini-roundup. Now that the heat wave here in New York has broken, I’m actually going outside.
Very true, Dee. People, particularly Americans, have a problem with romance because they have a problem with intimacy. I’m not talking about sexual intimacy, just the personal connection between two people. Many of the critics are really afraid of romance because they’re afraid to FEEL.
Amen, Chicki.
I sometimes wonder about the people who mock romance–do they really find it cheesy or whatever, or are they afraid to confront emotion. Granted, lots of romances can take this over the top, the same way thrillers can be unnecessarily gory or scifi can be unnecessarily bleak, all in an attempt to pull on the heartstrings of the reader and invest them in the story. The goal as the writer is to find the balance between expressing sentiment and being shmaltzy. At least that’s my take.