THE INTERNATIONAL PULPWOOD QUEENS AND TIMBER GUY BOOK CLUB
WHY KNOWING GENRE IS IMPORTANT Carolyn Haines
When I first started writing, I didn’t have a clue what I was writing—and I didn’t care. I was writing a story that just had to be told. I was a journalist, so I wasn’t well-schooled in point of view, structure, narrative summary versus immediate scene, or any of the writer’s tools that are used to create unforgettable experiences in the pages of a novel. I wrote without any real thought of being published. I wrote because I loved writing, words, language, and drawing people into my private and very special world. Eighty books later and after working with a lot of the big New York publishing houses, I know differently. A writer really should know his/her genre and should know the elements of story expected in each genre. Not to be a great writer, but to be a published writer. The human animal loves stories. We learn from them intellectually and emotionally. We “walk in someone else’s shoes” and that experience can teach us compassion and so much more. But humans also enjoy a certain pattern, a way that story unfolds. Doesn’t mean you can’t do it differently, only that when you do it differently, know what you’re doing and make it count. The 14 years I was director of the fiction writing program at the University of South Alabama, this is one of the basic 86
