Barging In: Genre and Conversation
The Victorian politician Benjamin Disraeli was not a reader. An 1868 edition of Fraser’s Magazine quoted him as saying that “When I want to read a book, I write one.” Disraeli was indeed a writer. In addition to his more expected political tracts, he wrote novels, poetry, and drama. But he apparently wasn’t terribly interested in reading the sort of work he was writing.
Fraser’s didn’t approve of these habits. Disraeli, the Fraser’s writer complained, was wholly unfamiliar with the conversations he was entering and remained “unconscious how completely his historical summaries and glosses [were] at variance with the authorities.” The writer was frustrated not that Disraeli disagreed with established historical argument, but that he seemed unaware of established historical argument altogether. It would be one thing, the writer thought, for Disraeli to apply his considerable intelligence to the historical record and diverge from established precedent, but another to proceed on claims that ignored his opponents’ stated positions.
Having read one of Disraeli’s novels, I am inclined to believe that he was not a reader, or at least not a reader of novels. His politics came before any concern with storytelling and as a result the novel I read was basically a series of tracts punctuated by plot. Although Disraeli realized the people like to read novels and don’t like to read tracts, he didn’t internalize what makes a novel a novel. Sometimes an ignorance of convention can result in innovation, but ignorance more often results in a reinvention clumsier than what has already been refined.
In choosing to write without reading, Disraeli refused himself the key component of genre: expectation. People who are already in conversation with a particular genre know what that genre expects, and when they decide to break from convention, they do so with intention. Genre is created through recursion. In some instances we know the specific progenitor of a genre and the moment of its creation, but in most cases genre builds slowly as people choose to repeat elements they enjoyed in a previous work or turn to previous works as examples. Subgenres emerge as a particular work becomes popular and inspires imitators, or in response to a particular anxiety or issue prevalent in the writer’s society. Sometimes there are multiple unrelated creators of a genre. Genre happens in community.
When a writer unfamiliar with the community enters a genre, they often blunder. Consider the many interviews in which a writer of literary fiction announces that they have invented a trope or a genre long celebrated by fantasy or romance readers. This sort of carelessness leaves the writer not just incorrect but rude, creating hostility among a potential ready-made audience for their work. In most cases, no disrespect is intended, but in the worst instances, it absolutely is. Sometimes a writer enters a field because they assume it’s easy, that the audiences are undiscerning, and that they will happily lap up any pablum placed before them. Disrespect for genre conventions is disrespect for genre audience.
This is true whether it’s a genre of fiction with a passionate audience or a more mundane genre such as a business email or flyer. The audience comes with expectations and it’s helpful to know what those are before you disappoint those expectations. Genre conventions are not always efficient, but they develop for a reason, over repeated use, and they create expectations that you need to be aware of. You might not think it makes sense to sign off on an email when your name is already displayed above, but it’s a convention that expectation has turned into etiquette.
That doesn’t mean you need to read emails with the attention you’d give a novel read for pleasure. But it does mean you should read some emails and familiarize yourself with the email culture you’re entering. Different businesses, schools, or social cultures have slightly different conventions, and it’s worth knowing what they are.
So much of writing is considering imaginary people and trying to gauge their imaginary reactions. As writers, we’re separated by time and space from our readers. We can’t usually gauge their reactions in real time as we do with speech. But that’s an opportunity, as well as an impediment. In speech, we have to pivot and react on the fly. In writing, we have the opportunity to reconsider, to edit, to conform to some genre expectations before the audience even sees the text.