Genres and my porous imagination

Or why I really, really can’t stick to one kind of book. And why you don’t want me to.

Authors and publishers talk a lot about genre. Some call it an artificial construct. Others say that genre is a great marketing mechanism and reader funnel. But most agree that the “smartest” sales move is to stick to a genre. If your readers love you for fantasy, keep writing fantasy for them. Thats how you get rich. And a not-insignificant portion of writers – especially self-published ones – call bullshit. They write whatever the hell the want.

You may have noticed – at least I hope so, since that means you’ve read more than one of our books – that Aron and I never stick to one genre. We’ve written on sci-fi trilogy, a fantasy novel, an urban fantasy serial and a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel. The next two books are a weird western duology, with a kids book and then erotica novella series waiting in the wings. We do have notes for another sci-fi novel, but we probably won’t get to that for a coupe of years.

The point is, we’re all over the place. This wasn’t a marketing choice or even a conscious “fuck you” to genre borders. Our imaginations just wander like squirrels on crack.

But there’s another reason for me (Erica, not Aron): I have what I tend to think of as a porous imagination. It’s easily affected by other stuff I’m reading or writing. I have to be careful about my media consumption when I’m deep in working on a book, or else it’s going to be a problematic influence on the novel. I can’t watch Star Trek when working on fantasy or else there’s going to be a wormhole in the sky. I can’t read The Dark Tower when I writing shiny sci-fi or else a gunslinger is going to wander through the middle of Axis. The same goes for writing. If I were to write two fantasies back-to-back, they would end up feeling almost identical. The first novel would bleed right into the second and make the waters so muddy I wouldn’t be able to see anything.

On the plus side, this means it’s easy for me to absorb influences on my writing. Anyone who has commented that the Reforged books reminds them of Firefly… Guess what I watched over and over? I’ve been reading a lot of The Dark Tower for The Hangman’s Cross and The Burning Noose. Memory, Sorrow and Thorn was a huge influence on In the House of Five Dragons. And the Blood Elf zone in World of Warcraft. Those stupid ostrich mounts absolutely inspired the kajjas in our book.

I hope you don’t think this means I rip off my inspirations. I sure hope not, at least… But that leads me to another dumb-ass facet of my particular brain. I really need help from those sources because I have a hard time imagining things I’ve never seen before. Every single place or person in any of our books has one foot in the real world, in some photo or movie location I’ve seen. Richard Mazrem’s house is based on the Getty Museum (as I saw it some years ago, while it was being worked on). Angel City is not just based on but actually set in downtown LA, where I grew up. Axis – odd as it may sound – takes a certain amount of inspiration from Ironforge, again from WoW, which I was playing at the time.

So the more I see, the more sources I have to draw on. If I have any hope at approximating originality, I need a lot of material to recombine. It can make preserving my own voice difficult, sometimes; it’s not just set pieces and characters that seep into my work, but the voice, too. It doesn’t help that I spent years trying like crazy to write just like Tad Williams. As a result, I really have to jump from genre to genre and keep things mixed up to keep my own imagination from just melting away into pop culture goo.

And if something you read reminds you of a movie or place you’ve actually visited, ask me – I may actually have based it on the very same thing.