Genre Scaffolding

What's holding up your beautiful story?

Via

Hey friends!

First off: TONIGHT, THURSDAY, JULY 17TH! 7pm! I will be in Verona, NJ at The Collective Bookstore to chat about WRITE THROUGH IT: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life! Come see me! And say hi! Don’t be shy!

Second, I want to talk today about a concept I’ve been turning over in my head for a while now. It’s about writing and plotting and pitch and hook all rolled into one. I’ll probably put most of this in terms of fiction writing, but honestly, it can apply to non-fiction, too. I’ve been calling it genre scaffolding.

A big question you have to answer about your book is what genre it is. Is it a romance? A mystery? A memoir? Read the post linked above if you are using 9 genres to describe your book. But regardless, you do need to know what genre you’re writing and thus what shelf it will go on in the bookstore. Remember, you only get one shelf. I’m thinking about the next book I want to write, and—surprise!—I opened an old file and discovered I’d written 60k words of a novel before I wrote WRITE THROUGH IT. I knew I’d worked a bunch on something, but I’d forgotten I’d written that much, lol. I’m reading it over, and it’s not that bad. I might have to rewrite the whole thing, but that’s fine. That’s how some books work.

I have realized, though, that—regardless of what’s on those pages—my pitch is too complicated. It takes too much time and effort to explain what is going on in this novel. See, it’s 1957 and one woman, Jean, wants to live at the Barbizon hotel but she doesn’t get in/doesn’t have the money so she gets a job at the Doubleday bookstore that’s in the lobby of the building and then she meets Jacqui, who is a rich socialite and then Jean starts writing insidery articles for the NY Post about the Barbizon and Jacqui finds out and manipulates Jean so that she can see the boy her parents don’t approve of and then they get caught and someone writes a book and Jean is cast out of the Barbizon. There’s also a contemporary timeline about a woman who gets fired from her publishing job and then starts ghostwriting books for this weird company and she find a manuscript in her recently deceased grandmother’s closet and the weird company wants to publish it but she’s starting to think her grandmother didn’t write it and the reader doesn’t know if her grandmother is Jean or Jacqui.

That is not a pitch. That is a (bad) summary. But I haven’t been able to land on what’s at the heart of this book, what the primary question is, who wants what and what happens if they do or don’t get it. I know I want this to be a historical novel (after toying with the idea of it being a “literary” novel with historical elements—which is fine but I’m just going to lean into what I love, which is historical novels). When I think of successful historical novels, like all of Fiona Davis’s books, or Joy Callaway’s, or all the ones with a woman with a suitcase in a tweedy suit looking at a plane flying overhead (i.e. about WWII), I can pinpoint that all include:

1. A real thing that happened. Yes, like a war, but also a specific person doing a specific thing

2. Plenty of fictionalization to make a true story interesting enough for a novel