Thanks to Charles Tan's fabulous Bibliophile Stalker blog, I clicked on the link to this great essay about lit, genre and horror by Peter Straub. Mr. Straub gives us a great deal to think about in this essay, from the publishing end of the business to the writers themselves. Here's a delicious sample:
"Genre fiction came into being because publishers discovered from the pulps that there was a market for it, and it stays viable because it’s like food, people keep buying books by Robert B. Parker and Michael Connolly to get the same delightful taste in their mouths over and over, as if the books were made of maple walnut ice cream."
For the entire essay go here http://www.themillions.com/2010/03/what-about-genre-what-about-horror.html
2 comments:
I've been saying similar things about television shows (i.e., that they are comfort food) in my recaps of CSI: Miami this season. Here's the irony: creative people strive to get a hit (TV show, book, song, movie role). Then, once they get it, they tire of it. Funny, but a good place to be in. For all the crassness of Gene Simmons of KISS, he has the perfect outlook on his career: he gives the fans what they want.
I think writers sometimes forget that readers read (and watch TV) to escape into another world, one of the reasons they love series. They know the characters and they're comfortable living in that world.
For writers, while a popular series brings success, they're stuck with a formula and the readers balk when they write something different. I think Parker, Robert, understood that, because his Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone series had the feel of the Spencer novels and incorporated some of those familiar characters into the new series to keep his readers comfortable in the new worlds he was creating.
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