Genre

I’ve sometimes had questions – OK, challenges – about the eclectic nature of my novels.  I mean, most authors choose their genre and stick to it, grinding out multiple variations of their first success and sticking with what they know they can do well.  Me?  I’ve got a couple of high fantasy trilogies consisting of 6 books and over 2,000 pages, a techno-thriller set in present day, an action adventure set in ancient Egypt, and an unusual book described as an urban fantasy that is beginning to bloom into its own series.

So, what’s the common thread here?  Am I expecting readers of high fantasy who have devoured the trilogies to immediately jump on a techno-thriller?  Did I get bored with urban fantasy and decide to switch to pre-histories?  Who the heck is my audience?

Well, to start with, my audience is me.  As I’ve preached previously (and often), you need to be your own favorite author, and the best way to make the material real for the reader is to write when the material is real to you.  However, this can also lead to the height of amateurism, writing for the sake of writing without considering the commercial aspect of the craft.  We are told to build your audience, to get name recognition, to acquire a dedicated following that will look forward to your next book in the confidence it will be similar to the last.  This is true, and a proven route to success.  But I suspect that successful writers like James Patterson and David Baldacci are often bored to tears when they crank out yet another variation on that tried-and-true genre demanded by their publishers, their agents, and their fans.  

Not exactly the ideal setting for breaking new ground.

I am, at heart, a storyteller.  The plot is the single greatest strength of my tales, and the plot twist is one of my most powerful tools.  When a story comes into my head, the only way it leaves is via a pen or a computer keyboard.  Oh, many will take months, years, or even decades to complete that journey, and all will curve and change and loop, and many will combine with other ideas over the course of their long birth.  But I don’t choose ideas.  They choose me.  And then they don’t leave me alone.  

Pharaoh’s Mountain is a prime example.  The first germ of the idea came from a passing reference in a book on Ancient Egypt that all the pyramids were robbed back in antiquity.  That raised the simple question of:  when?  A millennia later?  A century?  A decade?  Or the next month?  The builders of the pyramids had to have been fabulously rich, and by all accounts, they took a sizable portion of that wealth with them into the afterlife, a parade of treasure witnessed by half the country.  So, the prime incentive was there from the start.  But so were the defenses, the resources of the same state that had built the pyramids now dedicated to their protection.  

However, what if there were other forces, other powers, that were intent on seeing that state fail?  This was the first critical twist, the marriage of graverobbing with political necessity that gave rise to the action/adventure novel.  

It was the editor at New American Library who moved it towards a pre-history.  

This was the early 80s when Jeal Auel had made a major splash with The Mammoth Hunters, a story of pro-magnum and Neanderthal tribes.  That introduced the genre of the pre-history, taking what was known of a pre-historical setting and weaving fiction around and through.  The editor liked the idea of robbing the Great Pyramid, but he wanted to ride the current wave that Auel had created.  It forced me to dig deeper, to widen and enrich that action/adventure novel by giving the setting (and the society) a lot more power and color.

Over the decades, the novel underwent more re-writes and revisions than anything else I’ve ever written.  I had an entire series of chapters dealing with Prince Khafre (son of the Pharaoh Khufu and brother of the then-current Pharaoh who is seen in the book’s epilogue) moving against the rebels of Upper Egypt, adding additional scope and political power to the narrative.  It gave the work the broader, epic feel that a pre-history requires, but it also (in my opinion) tended to distract and weaken the focus on the actual invasion of the tomb.  So, I decided to revert to the original idea of the action/adventure, and I cut the Khafre chapters, moving the book from a somewhat unwieldy 112,000 words into a sharper 90,000.  

So there, in a nutshell, is the secret to my lack of success.  Good stories, nicely told with interesting characters that don’t really tie together.

But ain’t we had fun!