Genre is a b*tch

What am I even writing about?

This is how I try to imagine my future query letters, if I ever manage to gather enough courage to actually send them forward.

Dear agent,

“Upstream” is a Nordic-noir-dystopian-post-apocalyptic-societal-philosophical-institutional-coming-of-age story, where a young woman, after finding her mother murdered, must find her own way to exist in an isolated community following a twisted form of Aristotelian virtue ethics. Oh, and there’s magic, kinda.

I have no comps for this book, because I haven’t found any yet, but imagine if Agatha Christie, Lois Lowry, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and maybe Emmi Itäranta had a decently written love child, with a Terry Pratchett-esque humour sprinkled here and there. That’s it.

I am a scattered researcher suffering from an identity crisis and no job at the moment, and I need money.

Please read my book and don’t hate it. Or if you do, don’t tell me.

Best regards,

Katariina

Image by geralt, Pixabay

“Write a book you want to read”

That advice is very nice for writing a book. I love mystery novels, I love sci-fi and fantasy, I love science fiction. I love post-apocalyptic and dystopian literature. I love thought experiments in books, where a book expands over a single what-if question. So it makes sense that the book I’m currently writing is a weird mashup between all of these genres.

There are also quite a lot of things in these genres that irritate me. Take, for example, a common dystopian setting, where everything is oppressive in a very obvious way, and where institutional repression is done by design. What about oppressive communities that truly believe they are good? And that they actually are good places to live for most of the people? And the dystopian aspect comes to light in the ways in which shared social norms are enforced in the community?

Or what about post-apocalyptic literature, where the entire world has burned down, and small pockets of survivors fight for their resources? I want a story placed in a community of people who noped out from the chaos before everything crashed down and found a place for their families and descendants to be happy in. I want a story that examines the inevitable formation of social hierarchies that doesn’t need to rub it in my face.

That’s what I’m trying to write.

Hubris, perhaps

I’m not saying by any means that those books don’t exist. I have read plenty, in fact. But, I haven’t read anything that writes a good murder mystery in those kinds of settings (and please, if you know a title like that, please let me know!!). But here comes the issue: when people ask what kind of book I'm writing, I get stuck, and out of my mouth comes something quite close to the first sentence of that god-awful query letter.

It’s a murder mystery with Nordic noir undertones, but not really.

It’s a dystopian and institutional novel, but not really.

It’s a coming-of-age story, but not really.

It’s post-apocalyptic, but not really.

It’s fantasy, but not really.

It’s speculative fiction, barely.

It’s a thriller, but, nah, there are no intense chase scenes.

Coming up with a succinct description of one story is really, really hard, and maybe I’ll get there once that pile of pages is finished and edited and I have had some time to really think about it.

But right now I’m trying to be happy to figure out who did the murder and what happens to my poor little village when the water stops running. I’m enjoying the hubris of a writer, toying with my characters’ lives and hoping for a happy-ish ending.