Le Mot Juste

“And what is your particular genre?” she asked. I thought she had said gender so my startled look must have led her to think she was speaking to one of the less intelligent members of the species. “I mean, what is your literary style – your specialisation?”

Genre is one of the OK buzzwords that seem to surface from time to time and is now prevalent in the bookish world. It’s not one I like very much. For starters, no one seems to be sure how to pronounce it. You can go for the full-blooded Gallic approach with a fine rolling of “r”s and ending with an expletive sort of “eh” or then there’s the Anglo-Saxon mode of trying it through clenched teeth and without moving the lips. Which is why I thought she had said gender.

But my main objection is that inferring that you only write in one style is likely to seriously restrict your horizon. The “genre classifiers” seem to have made no slot for the “I’ll write anything for cash” group which, I suspect, includes most of us. Especially myself.

There is a modern penchant for specialisation, perhaps not a bad thing in a way, but one wonders what would have happened to Isambard Kingdom Brunel had he specialised in atmospheric railways? This, you may recall, came under the heading of “seemed like a great idea at the time but turned into a total fiasco,” but his more successful projects of ships, tunnels, bridges and railways were to make him famous. Hardly specialisation and he didn’t even have a university degree.

Books and the writing of them enables the mind to leap unfettered through the world and to restrict one’s self artificially to a specific genre (there’s that word again!) strikes me as being singularly unimaginative – and a lack of imagination will surely only lead to unimaginative writing. I notice there are several writing groups that concentrate solely on Science Fiction, surely they must read something else? Perhaps you get drummed out or blackballed for writing something worldly. Nothing wrong with Sci Fi if you like that sort of thing but H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote other stuff as well, as did Ray Bradbury. I suppose one can’t accuse them of not having broad horizons, but I’m sure you get my meaning.

It’s rather as if, having written a learned treatise on early Egyptian tablespoons (if they had them), you restricted yourself to the subject of their tableware to the exclusion of all else. Now there’s a genre for you.

I am unashamedly in the “write anything” school of thought – I find almost all subjects (save Egyptian tablespoons, possibly) of consuming interest, so when it comes to asking my genre, put me down as a “don’t know.”

And if you must use the word, try to avoid what I call the ventriloquial English school of pronunciation. It’s a French word and needs a bit of effort put into it. Then I won’t think you said gender.