First off, I just wanted to thank Connor for letting me on here. Connor is a good friend, a great writer and a big supporter of new talent. I am truly honored to be here.
There was a time I had a book reading/signing at a local bookstore here in Chicago. By the way, local bookstores are still alive and well and you should check them out, but I digress. It was a group thing where I was there with two other authors. I had my horror novel RIG and then there was another woman who had a kind of horror/thriller thing and finally a dude with this very bizarre and funny young adult novel. We all did our reading and then sat there in front of the attendees and answered questions. We were having a blast, but then one surly-looking guy in the back of the room suddenly asked a weird question.
“How do you differentiate between real authors and hacks?”
All three of us looked stunned. These days I recall that we all looked at each other. I am not sure if that is true or embellishment, but I do recall that each of us agreed that we would never really call a fellow author a “hack.”
To me, I always find it odd how people want to divide books into those that are considered “literature” and then the rest of it. As if genre fiction is somehow less than others. I have been on forums where people have railed against JK Rowling and the Harry Potter novels and how they are so awful! Really? I read all of them and loved each novel and got caught up every single time in the story, the action and the characters. To me, writing something that is read by four people in a class in a university somewhere is not really the career I want. To me, just because something is popular, it doesn’t make it less art, less literate, less than something else.
I am proud to say that I write genre fiction. Granted, many of my books tend to cross into several, but overall I write horror, suspense, thrillers and detective novels. I have dabbled in sci-fi and I have also written several non-fiction novels in true crime and history, but generally I consider myself a horror/thriller writer.
I am proud of that.
If you look at the books that are considered “literature” these days you might forget that many of those authors were just trying to make a living and were actually quite popular at the time. Charles Dickens usually published his novels in installments in a magazine and people lined up to get the latest issue because they love them so much. Starving to be a writer is not really more noble than writing something that makes a lot of money and becomes popular.
Look, I may disagree with the general public. I am not a fan of the Twilight books or the Fifty Shades stuff, but I can hardly fault the people who do like it and I cannot fault the authors who have made extremely comfortable livings with those books. I’d give ANYTHING for one of my books to become a runaway bestseller.
To me, a book needs to tell a good story. If you are not writing a thriller or a mystery or a romance, then you are writing a drama. That’s as much of a genre as anything else. If you go into a bookstore you even see shelves labeled “literature” so even that is a genre. We as people love to put things into categories and more and more we love to judge things based upon that box. I just want exciting characters and a great story. Throughout my life I have read mostly horror and thrillers, but I have also ready many things considered literature.
I am betting Harper Lee, when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird did not think it would be a novel read over and over in high school classes and discussed on and on. Franz Kafka didn’t even want his stuff to be published. JD Salinger was such a recluse that it’s hard to know what he wanted, but he sure didn’t want fame. All of that became literature later on, it wasn’t something they set out to do.
I don’t know the magical formula that makes a piece of fiction cross over from genre fiction into the world of a classic. I imagine that most of that symbolic stuff that you analyze and discuss in your lit classes were just happy accidents (the writer just wanted to write about a kid running through the jungle, you know?).
My latest novel is a thriller with elements of adventure and sci-fi thrown in. When I started writing The Lightning Weaver I just wanted to tell a story that would entertain and thrill people who read it. I knew it was going to be a Young Adult novel, but I also felt is crossed over nicely so that adults would enjoy it.
That was all I knew. I have no idea if people will want to be reading it twenty years from now. That would be nice, if they did, but right now I just hope some people like the story and want to see the second installment and then the third and fourth. That’s all I’m thinking about.
Maybe that makes me a “hack” in some people’s eyes. To me, it just makes me an author.
Bryan W. Alaspa is a freelance writer and professional author of both fiction and nonfiction. He lives in Chicago and has lived there almost his entire life. He spent a few years living in St. Louis. He first began writing when he sat down and wrote a three-page story on his mom’s electric typewriter when he was in third grade. It’s been all uphill since then!
Alaspa’s new novel, The Lightning Weaver can be purchased here.