How would you define or characterize your writing?
I’ve written in several genres of fiction, and I also love creative nonfiction. But I suspect you’re asking a bigger question than that—one that asks me to account for what and how I write, especially in regards to fiction. In order to answer that, a couple points of reference are required. At one end of the contemporary fiction spectrum, let’s say we have commercial, mass market, plot-driven genre fiction. At the other end we have plotless literary fiction. I see my own work as being smack dab in the middle of that spectrum.
I’ll explain. I started out as a literary writer. My first book was awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize by Joyce Carol Oates. So what does it mean to be a literary writer? It means that theme and character development, the character’s inner journey, are the most important elements to the story. Prior to the arrival of minimalism, it also meant that distinctive language was important, as were setting and mood and tone. Minimalism, to my mind, came into vogue in the late seventies and sucked all the lifeblood out of American fiction by employing pedestrian prose, vague settings, and a universal theme that life is bleak and meaningless. Fortunately, true minimalism died an early death, and in general contemporary literary fiction has gravitated away from that stark end of the spectrum. But literary fiction has still not yet fully reembraced the importance of plot.
And that is the most apparent difference between a genre novel and a literary novel. In the genre novel, plot is king; the story is typically driven by the need to resolve an external problem, such as saving the world from an asteroid, banishing an evil wizard to another dimension, or identifying and capturing a serial killer. The protagonist is often one-dimensional and does not change from the beginning of the novel to the end. In a literary novel, there often is no external problem to resolve; the story is driven by the protagonist’s emotional or psychological need—for love, for acceptance, for understanding, and so forth.
I wrote my first mystery novel in the early nineties. My agent’s response was that the novel was too well written to market as a mystery, and the plot was too strong to market as a literary novel. I said, “It’s a literary mystery.” He said, “There’s no such thing.” I said, “That’s why I wrote one.”
I ended up marketing that novel on my own, and that’s the kind of crime novel I’ve been writing ever since: one that pays attention to theme, deep characterization and character growth, dialogue with subtext, imagistic description, some interesting twist on structure when possible, and prose that, when applicable, reaches for the musical and poetic. And a fully developed plot.
Earlier in my career I described myself as a literary writer who never abandoned plot, and I think that definition still holds. Even in my noncrime novels I aim for a beginning, a middle, and an end, though the plot in those stories focuses on the character’s inner journey and not on some external goal.
Readers who prefer commercial mass market mysteries, which emphasize plot over any other element, might find my descriptions of setting and my characters’ introspections and inner struggles distracting from the external goal. But for me, the resolution of the external problem is not of primary importance, but serves to reveal and test character and drive it toward a changed state of awareness. For me, character growth is the most important part of a novel. The addition of a compelling plot with an external goal helps to bring about that inner growth.
It’s probably fair to say that I’m a throwback to the generation of writers preceding my own generation. I continue to reread Hemingway (who was not a minimalist, by the way, no matter what the minimalists claim), Steinbeck, Eudora Welty, and other masters of the twentieth century. I also read a few of today’s younger literary writers, but generally only their short stories. Like most readers, I need something to happen in a novel, but I also need those events to have meaning and application to the soul of humanity.
Acknowledgments