What is literary vs commercial fiction?

Hello and welcome to episode two of the Story Grid podcast. This is Tim Grall. I'm your host, and Sean is going to join me here in just a minute. But before we dive into this week's episode, I just have to say thanks so much to all of you that got behind the first episode of our show. Sean and I figured we'd put out the show and a few people would listen to it and that'd be pretty much it. But instead, we got so many emails, so many posts on social media, we had a lot of you leave reviews and ratings on itunes.

We were just really surprised by the.

Amount of you that listened to the show and enjoyed it. So thank you so much for that. We wanted to let you know that we set up a Twitter account. It's@twitter.com storygrid so just Torygrid. And right now, as of this recording, we have a grand total of three followers, and one of those is me.

So it doesn't really count.

But we wanted to let you know it's there because that's how you can interact with us.

If you want to ask a question.

That we can throw into a future episode of the show, that that's the.

Way to do it.

If you have feedback questions, do it on Twitter. Just Torygrid. And either Sean and I will jump in and answer your questions and respond to you. So without further ado, let's jump into episode two. We are talking about literary versus commercial fiction, and we start to dive into the giant topic that is genre. I hope you enjoy it.

Let's get started. Hey, Sean. So this week I want to start in the literary and commercial chapter of your book and just talk a little bit about, you call them two different cultures, commercial and literary. Just talk about that for a little bit. Explain what you mean by that.

Sure.

When I first started out in publishing, and this is probably the early 1990s, probably around 1991, 92, and I think it's still exactly the same way. I don't think it changes at all. Essentially what happens is if you say, Tim, you're 22 or 23, and you want to get into book publishing, you put your resume out there and say you get an interview at a major publishing conglomerate like Penguin Random House today. What you would do is you would go in and you would meet sort of the human resources guy, and he would put you through the paces, and then he would call you when a job opening job would open up. And this is what happened to me. And I interviewed with a company called Bantam Doubleday, Dell back then, which eventually was. Was. Became Random House. Anyway, so he called me and said, look, I have his job available at Dell Publishing. And Dell Publishing was. And still. Well, actually it's not very active right now. But it was. It was sort of like the first. One of the first paperback publishing companies in the United States. So what they concentrated on was really big sort of fun mysteries and romances and really great commercial stuff that you would read on the beach or, you know, your friends would read and tell you about. So I really didn't know that from Herman Melville. And I really just needed a job at that point. So I went in for the job and I got the job and I discovered, oh, my gosh, this is the stuff I love to read and I'm a little bit ashamed to tell people about, but, boy, this is a lot of fun. So I got to work with people like Elmore Leonard and Sarah Peretz and all these really terrific writers who are writing for Everyday Joes and Janes who just love to read. So as I was sort of progressing in my career, I discovered, oh, there's this whole other place in book publishing called literary. And the literary world was made up of people who would publish, you know, John Irving and Ann Tyler and on and on and on. Toni Morrison. And the houses that would publish these books were like Alfred A. Knopf and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. And so what I discovered was that there was this real sort of difference between people who loved commercial fiction and those who love literary fiction.

Explain. So I didn't even know half of those authors. You said on the literary fiction side. So what do you like? Give me some books and what you like. What do you mean by that? So, because you're saying it like there's this definite difference and I don't even know who they are. So explain to me, like, what that means.

Well, literary would mean somebody who would be up for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Right? It would be somebody like today we would revere somebody like Scott Fitzgerald or, let's see, Ann Tyler is a. Is a literary writer today who sort of skirts the literary commercial sort of chasm anyway. Toni Morrison, there's a great example. There's somebody who's written, you know, these really deep, thoughtful, kind of Thomas Pinchon who be considered a literary writer.

What do they write, though?

They write stories that are pretty much not plot terrific. Meaning you read the story. Jonathan Franson today would be considered a literary writer. They write stories that are sort of like, I'm sure you've heard the expression. And you're like the novel of the idea. You know, the novel of ideas. And so these are people who, you know, they go to the Iowa Writers Workshop, they get a master's in writing. They're very, very good line by line writers, meaning they write great sentences that are, you know, sometimes very difficult to follow, but are really brilliant, like William Gaddis, you know, people of the stature that teach writing at universities.

They are what everybody thinks of when they go into an English literature class. You're not going to go into an English literature class in high school and college and get a book written by Elmore Leonard and saying, you should read this because we want to talk about the deep, you know, the deep thoughts that are in this book. Get shorty. You know, you're not gonna, that's not gonna happen, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you will get like, you might get a Jonathan Fransen book today, like the Corrections, you know, somebody who is taking English literature class, they might be reading the correct. Which was a book that was published probably 10, 15 years ago that still resonates as sort of this novel of ideas. And when you say novel of ideas, basically what it means is that it's either a really in depth character study of somebody who's sort of like going through life and the vicissitudes of strange things happen to them, and you're not really sure where the story is going, but the writing is really interesting and, and you feel like you should keep reading it. And every now and then the writer pulls you back in with a really great line, but you're not really totally compelled or convinced that this is something that you want to, you know, burn up your beach day with. That's kind of what literary means. It's really sort of PhD, smart guy, master's degree, deep thought, Dostoevsky. You know, people who have read the great novels of all time, they consider themselves literary. It's sort of a snooty, I'm smarter than you kind of way of separating literature.

All right, so that's, it's, it's interesting you, you say that because.

I think I almost fell asleep. You just talking about this?

Well, yeah.

So it's funny because I'm, I must be definitely on the commercial side.

Yeah, you definitely are.

You.

And people who love science fiction or mysteries or crime or, or love stories or any of those really terrific sort of commercial external genres are gonna, they're commercial readers.

And in the book, you, you say it's to the screenwriter, it's the Same as, like independent versus studio.

Exactly. It's, you know, if you, if you love Guardians of the Galaxy versus, you know, Howard's End. You know, Howard's End is a. It's not D.H. lawrence, but anyway, it's one of the major English writers. I'm sorry, E.M. forster. Sorry. And, you know, that was an adaptation of an E.M. forster novel that, that was fantastic. But it's very drawing room English sort of sensibilities about the changing of a culture as opposed to blowing things up, you know. And so anyway, Dell Publishing at the time was all about those big, fun, crass, commercial fun reads. And Knopf is about finding. Finding the next Nobel Prize winner. Now this, this might seem like silliness to somebody who's not inside the book publishing industry, but inside the book publishing industry. It's sort of the hatfields and the McCoys. Right? It's like the literary people look down their nose at the commercial people and the commercial people think the literary people are snobs. And really, it's so true. So great. Right? And it's. To this day, this is exactly the same stuff that's going on now.

Well, and so from my point of view, what I, what I see is I separate it by the people who make money writing and the people who don't make money writing.

Well, that's an easy way of doing it. And I don't necessarily agree. I think there are a lot of literary writers who do make really substantial. And the. Jonathan Frantzen is a very good example. There's a guy whose latest novel, Purity, you know, that's going to be on the New York Times bestseller list. It's, you know, Oprah picked his first two of his novels as, as her collection. The great thing about Oprah, you know, it's like her book picks, she, she doesn't really care. I can tell by the way she chooses books. She'll choose, you know, Wally Lamb, who's considered sort of a commercial fiction writer, and she'll choose Jonathan Franson. And she won't really even distinguish between the two. So she'll pick as many, you know, Dell books as she will Knopf books. And I don't really think she just picks what she likes, which I think is awesome. So the divide is really about, you know, those who are after great reviews and great accolades and, let's say, literary pretensions of lasting forever and ever and ever versus somebody who writes a great episode of Mannix or, you know, I always say Mannix, and no one knows what I'm talking about, but like Special Victims Unit or something.

I see. Yeah. So. Because I'm interested in talking about this because in the work I've done with authors, there's authors that come to me and they tell me about their book, and I just want to be like.

Yeah, that's not going to sell. I mean, there's nothing I can do for you.

And I feel bad, but there's this level of like, you know, they'll come to me with this, like some kind. I don't know. I don't want to say what, but like some kind of. Just one where I'm like, that that's never gonna be a big seller and, you know, and I don't have magic dust to sprinkle on it.

Right.

And so it's interesting because as I approach this, I'm thinking like, well, one, I want to write what I like to read, which is definitely on the commercial side, but at the same time, like, I'm interested in.

Writing books that have a chance of selling enough that I can make money on it.

Yes.

And to me, the commercial side is definitely more likely to do that than anything.

That's correct.

Than the literary side. So, yeah, it's not like, you know, you can find edge cases anywhere. But commercial is commercial because it sells, because it's commercial. I mean, that, you know, more people are going to watch the Avengers movie than some kind of obscure whatever that come out.

Well, here's. Here's the thing. Tim and I talk about this a little bit in the book. I think everybody's. Everybody's goals and everybody's. Whatever their. Whatever floats their boat is. Is valid. Right. But as you said when you. When you spoke a little while ago, just know, you know, know where you sit on this sort of commercial literary spectrum before you write your book. Right. So, for example, I bring up the title Lolita. You know, Nabokov's Lolita. Now, Lolita, now today is considered this remarkable novel that's literary and also really compelling to read. So even though it's a difficult slog at the beginning to get used to the way Nabokov writes and the language that he uses, once you sort of get into the story, it's really compelling and it's really disturbing, too. It's like Stephen King meets, you know, I don't know. It's. It's really a remarkable book. So anyway, when he wrote that book, I can guarantee you a couple things. I can guarantee you he didn't think it was going to be a big sensation. I think he probably thought to himself, chances are nobody's going to publish this book. You know why? Because it's about a pedophile.

And he gave himself this impossible task, right? He said to himself, I'm going to write a novel about a pedophile in which people, when they read the book, are going to root for the pedophile to actually get his conquest. So if you're thinking that and you're a writer, hey, that's pretty cool, you know? And if you can pull that off, God bless you. But don't expect anybody to want to read that book. Right?

Yeah, no, I hear you.

But he was such a great writer. And of course, when he did publish it, the only country that would publish it was France. And when it was brought over to the United States, you know, Grove Press brought it over. Bernie. I forget his last name. Anyway, I know all this publishing history that's. Could bore people to death. But, you know, it was considered inflammatory, pornographic, terrible, the worst thing that. And it could corrupt miners and all this stuff. But it's really. It's one of those. Those rare books that is both literary and commercial in that people who invest the time, you know, they do it out of sort of, you know, medicine at first, like, oh, I gotta read this great novel. And then once they get into it, it's like commercial bat out of hell kind of reading. So just to go back to the main point and your point, which I think is a really good one, hey, you should really know what it is you want to write and make sure that your goals for what you write are realistic. So you, Tim. I don't know anything about what you write other than the fact that you want to write some science fiction. Now, science fiction happens to be right now, an extremely popular genre. It always has been. And if you hit it the right way, you could be anybody from, you know, Kurt Vonnegut, who's on the literary spectrum, to, you know, a popular science fiction writer today, which I can't, off the top of my head, I can't even think of somebody, but, you know, probably every single one of them. So there is. Within each genre, there's the literary end and there's the commercial end, too. And there's always a place for you if you understand, hey, what I'm getting into. I need to write for myself, okay? That's the number one thing. I need to have something that's going to obsess me to the point where I'm going to invest at least 12 to 18 months in, probably more. But you know, don't kill yourself at the beginning and think you're going to spend the rest of your life on a book. But you really need to have something that's going to obsess you to that point. So it's got to engage you. You can't be writing to some formula because when you write to formula it becomes really boring and stale and you can't run away from that. So that's the first thing. Yeah.

Did you, did you see that NPR article? When it comes to book sales, what counts as success might surprise you. Did you see that?

No, I didn't.

So it's really interesting. I'll put in the show notes. But it goes through and talks about like these, these books that get these awards and how little they actually sell. So let's see, there was this one part I wanted to read. Oh, the Pulitzer Prize. Ann Tyler, the only writer on the list with six figure sales for her book A Spool of Blue Thread. But then it goes into others that have sold between 15 and 20,001 that sold like 3,600 copies. And how this is, and they quote an 8 Jane Distill, a sensational sale would be about 25,000 copies. I just think that's interesting for people and I, you know, we know that because we're in the industry. But like to me that's like coming in from the outside. If I heard those numbers, I would be appalled that that's what's considered success. Is 25,000. Like huge. Sensational is the word that was used, is 25,000.

Yeah.

I mean, and so I think that's because what I get into is like, okay, as I've started to map out several ideas for books, I have, like, if I have five different ideas for books, I want to pick the one that has the most possibility, you know, if all of them are interesting to me, you know, I want to pick the one that has the most possibility for commercial success. Like that just makes sense.

Yes.

And so that's kind of what I'm getting at here. And also I think it's really important for people to think about like, who, what am I doing this for? Like, yes. Am I doing this so that I can someday impress an elite group of people who will never be actually impressed? Or like, am I doing this for myself? And what's gonna mean success for me? Is it, is it sales? Is it making X amount of dollars? Or is it getting written up in X, Y or Z publication?

That's a really good point. And that you're you're speaking, you're answering the question that you answered me at the beginning. Because if you're after the great review, you're, you're a literary person and you want Michiko Kakatani at the New York Times to review your book and give you a rave. And if that is the case, you know, that's, that's a real. It's not. I don't think it's a realistic goal, but it's a goal.

But if you want to entertain people and you want to have been read by a lot of people, then you don't really care so much about the reviews. What you care about is getting your book into people's hands and see if they read it.

Yeah, I think one interesting topic is go to Amazon and read the top reader reviews of Fifty Shades of Grey and all of them talk about what a horrible writer she is, but yet that is the biggest selling book since Harry Potter or whatever. And it's like, and I just think it's so interesting that idea of like, because I can't remember where I'm reading so much stuff I'm writing. I think it was in story grid, but like a, a well written, let's see, how should I put this? So like a book with a fantastic story that's not written very well will get more widely read and entertain more people than a book with not a good story, but written perfectly, absolutely true.

And when you say written perfectly, I think what you're talking about are line by line skills. Line by line, sentence by sentence, dazzling turns of phrase, metaphors, impeccable.

Points of view. That sort of thing is a, it's a really important skill. And what a lot of people think of when they think of writing is that's all they think of. Now storytelling is something completely different. And storytelling is what made 50 shades of gray so exciting. I also, you know, I could go off for a half an hour about, you know, the other thing that really determines whether or not a book sells or not. Depending on depending, you can, you can write a great book that has a great story and is extremely well written line by line. So you can combine the best of commercial being storytelling and literary being line by line writing. You can combine both of those things in a great book and for whatever reason, the moment of the culture at the time just doesn't coalesce with that story. Right. So every day what we walk around, we're constantly bombarded with stories and the culture and everything of that sort. I was talking to my friend Steve Pressfield, about this yesterday, and it doesn't. Sometimes what's really frustrating is you can really work very, very hard on something, and it's very successful on two very big important levels. But if it's not of the time, if it's not, you know, if it doesn't sit into this sort of sweet spot of the cultural, you know, way of everybody thinking, it may not perform. Now, 50 Shades of Gray, that's a really fascinating study if you ask me. There's a book, hundred million, two hundred million copies of that book have been sold. Right.

I heard a figure somewhere of like the percentage of overall book sales that it ate up for a while. It was like, extremely high. I wish I could remember.

Oh, yeah, that's probably a good 10%.

Yeah. Of like, all books sold. It was selling 10%.

I mean, it sold so well that Random House had so much money that they gave $5,000 to all. All their employees as a Christmas bonus. I mean, think about how much money that is because it was better for them to give those bonuses than to pay the taxes, you know what I'm saying? Because no corporation is going to give a bonus unless they can get a tax advantage out of it. So that's how much money that book made. And what's fascinating to me is that it was self published. You know what I mean? It was ignored, it was ridiculed, it was. People thumbed their nose at it. There's no way that book ever, ever would have gotten out of the slush at any major publisher until it became a sensation. Then they're like, oh, great, we love your book. We'll keep your cover, too. And we'll do whatever is necessary to take 95% of your revenue. But that's a whole nother story.

Well, you know, and I think that's. Oh, that picked something in my, in my thought process because the idea that it was picked up like that.

And who published it, a very, very literary place. Vintage Books, which is the paperback division of Knop. So is that the biggest irony ever?

Well, so, okay, here. Okay, this is what I wanted to come back to is like over and over, when I read stuff from the industry, like the Authors United or whatever and that kind of stuff. And they're talking about how publishing is protecting literature, you know, like, that's one of the goals. And I'm like. And at the same time, they paid a huge advance to Kim Kardashian for a book of her selfies. Of course, you know, And I'm like, you can't have it both ways. Like you can't say you're the beacon in literature and, and then do whatever it takes to make money. You know, like, I don't, I'm totally fine with you doing everything that, that it takes to make money. I just don't think you can play both sides of the card. I just don't think that's fair because there, when they look at the slush pile that is self publishing out there, you know, they're like, well, you know, we're, we're, we have this process and we make sure it's well, dah, dah, dah, dah. Yeah. And then they publish 50 Shades of Gray, which there's no standards that, that meets other than it sells a lot of copies.

Exactly. We have standards until you have a very successful book and then we're happy to take it off your hands and take all your revenue.

Okay, so I felt like that was a good point to hit here because, you know, we're, the whole idea of this podcast is to help writers be more successful. And I think it's just good to make sure like you, like we were talking about, you know, what you're getting into, you understand the economics of it. And I think the whole point of the story grid is to give you the best shot at writing the best book. Obviously, no guarantees, but that's what we're trying to do here is give you the best shot at the best at success.

Okay, so I want to jump into the actual in this one, I want to jump into the, the story grid and I'm starting in the, the chapter 11, the story grid in action. And I just want to start with that. First you give six questions that you're supposed to ever you should ask when, when writing every story. And this goes into the full scape and we'll get into all that in future episodes. But the first one is what's the genre? And so I got all these books, doggy, all these pages dog eared. And so, so you say about genre. So that's the first question you're supposed to ask is what, what's the genre? And then you say, you know, genre choices are the most important, important decisions you need to make. And then a couple paragraphs down you say knowing genre is the single best way to avoid doing a hell of a lot of work for not. So tell me about.

Why it's important that that's the first thing you do is pick a genre and why that's going to save you so much time down the road by picking Your genre up front.

Okay. Well, it's sort of like, I think in the last episode I mentioned, like, the house analogy. If. If you're building a house and somebody says, what do you want in your house? And you don't have an answer for them, and you say, I don't know. I went half Cape Cod, half modern, half. I'm not really sure. You know, let's just start and see where it goes. Right? Yeah, that's a. That's a nightmare. You know, nobody would do that. Nobody would say to a builder, hey, get. Let's just start at Cape Cod, and then we'll just. We'll switch if we want to.

We'll see how it goes.

Right?

Yeah.

And it's the exact same thing with the story. What genres are. It's a big, big fat fancy word that's French. That basically means, what category? You know, if somebody had to ask you, what's the category of your house? You would be able to answer it. You would say, well, it's a Cape Cod. It's a split level. It's a. It's a Victorian, whatever. So when somebody. So genre is really important because it narrows your choices. It narrows down, you know, from this big mess of the universe, what it is you want to focus on. So genre has. There's sort of like five components of genre, but the ones everybody sort of knows intuitively are those things like you say, I want to write science fiction. And that's a great place to start because now, you know, okay, everything that I want to put into this story, I have to put into the science fiction kind of building. And a science fiction building has the following things. And so I need to list the things that have to be in my building so that my building will stand properly so it won't fall in. And, you know, people will know when they look at it, oh, that's a science fiction building. They won't think it's. It's half science fiction, half mystery, half love story, half, you know, it's going to have a very specific feel to it. And this, you know, this. All this. This is the beginning of what, you know, a publisher would do. That's how they market things. They're going to look at a story and say, how. What kind of story is it? How do we put a cover on that story so that people, when they go into a bookstore, are going to know what that story is about? So it's a way of explaining to your audience, because nobody writes for themselves. I know everybody says they do, but everybody Writes so that other people will read them and tell them how great they are, right? They will say, you moved me. That makes you feel good. If you're the writer, you move me. That sentence you wrote was really killer. In fact, I wrote that down and I put it next to my computer because it made me feel better. That makes a writer. That's why we write, you know, that's. It's so other people can share and we can share our experiences and they become universal and everybody can feel like part of a community. And that's not cheesy, that's just true. You know, we all want to commune with people. And one of the ways we do that, the primary way we do that is by telling a story. So genres, what they do is they tell your audience what to expect.

So the very, very first thing you should do is to figure out what genres do I like. And the great thing, Tim, is that we're all so perfectly, you know, since the time we were born, we've been exposed to stories, right? So whether we know it or not, everything that's in the story grid is intuitively in everybody's DNA. So what the book basically is doing, it's giving shape to something that, you know intuitively. So genres we all know, intuitively, we all know what a knock knock joke is, right? We all know what a fable is, a parable. We all know.

From the time we were a kid, we know what a Dr. Seuss book is like. We know we're going to get great rhyming, we're going to get a great moral center in Dr. Seuss book. Gonna get some really cool art. And it's the same thing when you're writing science fiction. Are you going to write, you know, something that's, it's gonna involve real science or made up science. Are you gonna write about magical worlds or, you know, and I can go on and on and there's a ton of stuff in the book.

Well, you said, you said, you said that genres have conventions. And then you also talked about obligatory scenes. So what's the difference?

A convention would be something like in a love story, a convention would be you would have.

Lovers, right? You would have a man or a woman or two men or two women or whatever your story is. And then there's going to be the third, what I call the, like the third wheel, you know, the third wheel character that's a convention and third wheel character is that that person who's engaged to one of those lovers, right? Or is going to get in between or so it's like a competing love interest. If you don't have a triangle of love interest in the love story, there's no conflict, right? Because there's no. There's no place for the. For the one partner to say, oh, this guy's bothering me. I'm going to go with the other one. And so the other guy doesn't think that he's going to lose the person if there's no competition. So you need a competition. So that's a convention. It's a character or it's a setting. Say it's a war story. A convention of a war story. Guess what? There's going to be a battle. There's going to be a battle scene. You got to have some blowing up. You got to have guys fighting each other. That's a convention scene. Now, an obligatory scene is a very, very specific moment in the story that the reader or the viewer expects to happen. And if it doesn't happen, it's going to piss them off. It's gonna make them say that this is terrible. This guy's just. This isn't a love story. I'm not even sure what this thing is.

You know what?

I.

You know, one of the things I figured out reading. Reading story grid was the. So I love romantic comedies, okay?

Oh, who doesn't?

Confession time. Until those last scenes, like, they always drive me insane because then it gets all, like, sappy and, like, it was this really funny, quirky movie, and then, like, it get. And. But then I realized, like, oh, if that wasn't in there, the entire movie would fall apart. But I. It's always funny because what you're.

What you're talking about is somebody who hasn't innovated an obligatory scene. So what you're saying is that you've. You're. You're talking about romantic comedies that. That make an obligatory scene a cliche. They're following old, you know, innovation, and that's what a cliche is.

Okay, so, like, my. One of my favorites is.

How to.

Lose a guy in 10 days. No.

Yeah, I think that's it. I. I didn't see it. But that's the one with Matthew McConaughey, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one.

So, yeah, so it's this really funny setup where basically. So, spoilers ahead if you haven't seen it, but it's been out a while, so that's your fault.

I'll tell you what. I haven't seen the movie, and for fun, let me. Let me try and tell you what. What the Major movements of this story are without. Just based on the title and on the genre and see how close I am. Okay, I haven't seen the movie, okay? So let's be fine. It's how to Lose a guy in 10 days. Okay? So I'm gonna just say, okay, so the lead character is some sort of playboy, and.

You know, the female love interest probably makes a bet with somebody. Like, I'm gonna let this guy seduce me, and then I'm going to make it so irritating for him that he'll dump me or something like that. And then by the end, they fall in love and live happily ever after. That's so spot on.

So, like. So, yeah. So Matthew McConaughey is this big ad executive who. Who's hot, and everybody wants him. And then. Oh, I forgot the girl's name.

Kate. She's great. Kate, yeah.

Hudson.

Hudson. Yeah.

And she works at a. At like, a Cosmopolitan type magazine.

Oh, yeah. She has to be a magazine writer. Okay.

So. And she got the. She got this article of, like, she has to, like, get a guy to, like. That's exactly what you said. Get a guy to like her, then do all the things girls normally do to drive him away. And so there's all this really funny stuff where, like, he. You know, she gets. She hooks him, and then she. She turns and, like, starts doing all this crazy stuff to, like, drive him crazy. But, see, he has to keep her because.

He had. He had a bet going. Yeah, he had a bet going.

Of course. So, like, be a bet somewhere.

Yeah, he can't dump her because of something else. And so they're, like, stuck together until, of course, like, she ends up meeting his family and, like, falls in love with them and realizes that they're supposed to be together. And then, of course, there's the moment when they both realize what was really going on. They get all pissed off. One, you know, Kate Hudson leaves, and then he's, like, racing down the highway on his motorcycle to catch her before she leaves town. You know, that's the point where I'm like, okay, I've had enough. You know, the funny part was in the middle. And then I was like, okay, but how many of those have we seen where, like, you're running and chasing somebody through the airport or down the road or whatever?

Yes, yes. And the reason why that was a big Hollywood movie, and it did extraordinarily well at the box office, as I recall. And the thing is, is that we love that story. You know, we love that setup. We love that. I Mean, the Philadelphia Story is a great example of the romantic comedy, and it's so great. So what an obligatory scene is, is that moment where, you know, the lovers, lovers, they have to meet. Cute, right? So the setup is. The hook is there's some cute meeting that we haven't seen before it. And then they have to sort of like parry, you know, they have to sort of get into kind of like this. They're opposites, you know, they're. They're trying to do different things and they clash and then they sort of have this moment where they have their first kiss, right? And that's an obligatory scene, the first kiss scene, the meet cute scene. These are all what I call obligatory scenes in a love story.

Like Brokeback Mountain. There's a great love story about two guys and it's a western. And when I went to see the movie, it's the last thing I wanted to see. But my wife is like, I really want to see this. And I went to see it, and it's one of the best love stories ever put together. And it has all of those things and it doesn't. It. It innovates all of these conventions and obligatory scenes in a way that are quite shocking and extremely moving by the end of that. And. And it's a really terrific movie if you haven't seen it. But anyway, so the romantic comedy, and then they have. So they have the first kiss and then the big climactic moment of a love story is proof of love. It's the proof of love obligatory scene. And the proof of love is when you know the guy, like in Terms of Endearment, when Jack Nicholson, at the very end of the movie, he shows up. You know, he shows up. Shirley MacLaine's daughter is dying in the hospital. He's already dumped Shirley McLean. He's this big astronaut. Shirley Maclean's sort of like this bitchy, suburban, you know, widow. And you know, the astronaut played by Jack Nicholson kind of had an affair with her. He had fun. He was the next door neighbor. And then she started to become grating and irritating. So he kind of dumps her, right? And you know, oh, man, they're a perfect couple. They should really be together. So you kind of root for them to stay together. But when Nicholson dumps her, you're like, he's acting in character. He's really not going to end up with somebody like Shirley MacLaine, right? So at the end of the movie, the proof of love, that's the beauty of that movie. In that novel, Larry McMurtry wrote it and forget it. I mean, Larry McMurtry, talk about a genre master. That guy can write westerns, love stories, whatever. Anyway, he wrote the screenplay to Brokeback mountain. Anyway, so McMurtry, at the end of that, at the end of the book and at the end of the movie, Nicholson shows up after Shirley MacLaine's daughter has been diagnosed with cancer. The daughter's about to die in the hospital. Shirley MacLaine hasn't showered in nine days. Right. She's a freaking wreck.

And she's coming out of the hospital, and who's standing outside? Jack Nicholson. And he just looks at her and he says, what can I say? I love you. And at that moment, that's the proof of love. And that's when everybody's heart just explodes when they watch that scene. Okay, so that's.

That's the same as, like, McConaughey, like, racing down the road on his motorcycle with the love fern in the back of his motorcycle. That's that scene.

Which one's better? Which one's more?

Oh, yeah, right.

Yeah. So they're both the same scene. One sort of takes the easy way out because we all want to see Matthew McConaughey ride that motorcycle. And the studio execs want to see that moment. Right? We want to see that moment. Well, and I know that, but we also want. We want something deeper, too. So, you know, the romantic comedy, the way they pitch. Look, they didn't pitch Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson as something that's going to move you, you know, as a human being. They pitched it as, hey, you're going to have fun for two hours. And they delivered. You know, that's a story that works. Even though.

Reminds me of it makes me think of Bridesmaids. Did you see that?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And it makes me remit, like, so the very last scene is when she walks out and her guy's standing there against the car. And, like, now, as I think about it, I'm like. I feel like at the end, they're like, oh, crap. Yeah, we got to tie up the love story. And this, like, threw it in, because that's how it always happens. They walk out and the guy standing there, because that wasn't the point of the movie, but they still put it in anyway, because you have to. Because at the end, if they hadn't put them together, we've been like, what the heck happened there?

That's right. That's like. That's. That's what you call a reshoot. You Know, they pull the cast together back for one, you know, day of shooting. Because what happened is they took that movie to a test audience, and the test audience was like, we really liked it, but why didn't she get back to. With her boyfriend, right? And so the studio's like, hey, let's just. Let's pull it together. It's Gonna cost us $2 million for the day. We gotta get that shot. And, you know, that's. Nobody wants to make that movie where nobody, you know, the word of mouth is bad because they don't have that stupid shot at the end, right?

Which is how funny. Like, so I'm starting to get a sense for how necessary these are, because they're that necessary with that scene. I never talk about that scene. I talk about the scene where they're, like, getting the wedding dresses, and I talk about the scene where she gets thrown off the plane, like. And how funny it is. But if that hadn't been in there, I would have been like, man. But something was. I don't know. It was okay.

That's right.

That's the point of genre and obligatory scenes and conventions is, hey, don't be. Don't put your nose in the air and say, I don't want to add that stupid scene. That's a stupid scene. I don't want to have Matthew McConaughey on the motorcycle. Okay, totally cool. I get it. Don't have that scene. But you've got to do something better in the setup, right? Do a better scene, write a better story. But you have to have that moment. The proof of love scene in a love story is required. If you don't put it in your book, won't work, and nobody will talk about it. And people might admire little pieces of it, and it might become a cult classic that someday sells 5,000 copies underground. But it's not going to get anybody to say, hey, man, you got to read this book. Wait till you get to the end.

I don't even know how to explain it to you. And that's what's going to give you so much joy as a writer. When you crack. When you crack an obligatory scene in a brand new way, that's what gives you the juice to keep moving forward. So my suggestion, and it's more like a rule than a suggestion, is if you want to be a writer and you got to know your genre, right? And it's really not that difficult to learn it, like, if I were. If I were to make a suggestion to you, Tim, I would say, hey, pick out your five favorite novels, the five ones that you wish you had written that are in your genre. So don't take, don't take the Great Gatsby and you know that, that novel you were talking about last week and put them in the same basket. They have to be in the same genre. So if you want to, if you want to write a disillusionment plot, yeah, get the Great Gatsby. But if you want to write science fiction, find those five pivotal, pivotal books that are all similar of a genre that you love, okay? Sit down and read them and take notes and think to yourself, I'm going to list the things that these five books have in common. What are the conventions and what are the obligatory scenes? And usually within genres you can probably, I think it's safe to say that you're going to find at least 10 to 15 things that those five books are going to share.

And then once you have that list, you're going to say, okay, these must be the convention. And the other thing is, Tim, is that we live in a connected world now, right? And on Story Grid, there's, there's a place to sign up thing called the Story Grid forum. And there's about, I don't know, like six or seven hundred people on there now. And what they do is help each other. So if you're a big science fiction fan, you can find other science fiction fans and you can break up the work, right? You can, you could do one book, somebody else could do another book. And then you compare and contrast and email each other and go on the forum and figure out whatever. I mean, I would love to just lock myself in a vault and do this kind of work because it's what I love to do. But I have to balance, you know, having a family and a life and all that. But, but I would love to do this for each of the genres and maybe someday I will. And love Love Story. I know pretty well crime and thrillers and mystery and all that stuff, but science fiction I'm a little weak on, so that's what I would suggest. And once you have that list, now you're ready to rock, you know, now you know, I've got to deliver this stuff. How am I going to do it in a unique way? How am I going to set up that scene that's different from the guy in the motorcycle or the guy in the car or the guy running down the hall at the airport or the guy who. Or the woman who's running through the park? You know, how many times have we seen that.

Yeah.

And you know, have fun with it. You know, one of the great things is watch movies, man. Watch every science fiction movie. It's like what you were saying last week about watching the Garfield cartoon and saying, oh, my gosh, there's the inciting incident.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can pick that stuff out anywhere. And it's fun. Yeah, it's.

Well, and that's part of it is like, if you can't force yourself to sit down and read five great books in the genre you want to write in, you might want to rethink the whole idea anyway, because I've got. Right now I'm reading. Oh. And this is something I wanted to start doing on most episodes is just talk about what we're reading. So right now I'm going back and I'm rereading this book. I just finished this epic 1.75 million word book worm, that was extraordinary. But I'm exhausted. And so, so I've read. I read Girl on the Train, which is. Which was a fun, like, mystery thriller thing. And now I'm rereading one of my favorite fantasy books, which is the Way of the Shadows by Brent Weeks, which is. Okay, so I'm just going to tell this story.

Yeah, please. I haven't read it. I'd love to.

Well, so if you had asked me, I think I'm five years in now, but if you'd asked me prior to five years ago, and now I've been read. I read a ton. I've always read since I can remember. And so. But if you had asked me, like, who reads fantasy? I would have, like, pictured the greasy guy in his mom's basement. Right. And so I didn't read fantasy, wasn't interested in it. I wasn't that kind of a person. Person. Now we're showing my biases where I'm all against the literary commercial thing. But. So that's one of. That was one of my biases. Well, I had played this video game called Assassin's Creed. Oh, man, I gotta come back to that, too. But I played this video game called Assassin's Creed, which was real big at the time. And I was walking through Barnes and Noble and this picture, this cover, the book stood out to me because it reminded me of that video game. And I picked it up and I looked at it and it was about an assassin. And I was like, oh, man, this is. I love assassin books. And so I'll read it. But it was the third. It was the third book in the series. So I went home and ordered the first book, the Way of the Shadows, and I started reading it. And it wasn't until like, a third of the way into the book or something, and I'm actually paying attention now as I read it, and there's not much, like, magic in it, so I just thought I was reading this fun kind of medieval assassin story. Then all of a sudden, somebody, like, throws a fireball at somebody, and I'm like, what. What am I reading? I got this fantasy book, but I'm so hooked on it that I ended up just blowing through the entire series, the trilogy. Well, fast forward a year, and I'm reading another fantasy book. And my wife, she's Candice, she's like. She's like, you're really into that fantasy, those fantasy books. And I'm like, no, no, no, I don't read that many. You know, I'm not. I'm not a fantasy reader. I've just read. She goes, how many of you read last year? And I counted up, and it was like, 14.

I was like, oh, my gosh, what has become of me?

You should start a club.

Oh, it's. It's. It's. It's a little sad. And. Oh, another thing I'll just throw in here is I talked to a guy at Orbit, which is the publisher.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And. And I told him that story about Assassin's Creed. He goes, oh, that's really interesting because that's why we put that cover on. It is. We knew that game was really popular, and so we designed the COVID to match the game so it would catch people's eyes. I was like, oh, that's really fascinating. I was like, well, it worked on me.

So.

Exactly. That's. That's what a publisher does, is like, how do you. How do you make the connection for people between different, you know, cultural moments in time? So that's why they change.

Yeah. So I'm going back and reading it because it's like, if I could make people feel the way I feel reading this book, that's kind of my goal.

Right.

And so it's like this brutally, like, violent and, like, just dirty.

Assassin story. And those are, like, my favorite kind. You know, it's got to be violent. It's got to be, like, everybody. There's no good in anybody. And, wow. You know, like, that's my kind of book for some reason. I don't know. I'm a pretty nice guy otherwise.

Yeah, that's probably why you're suppressing all of your negative energy. And it has to go out in your fantasy.

Yeah, so. So that's what I'm reading right now. The way the shadows. I'm. I'm probably about 15 into it now, and just. It's the first time I've gone back and I'm going to reread all three of them. Just. I mean, my f. Still my fa. Maybe it's because it was my first, but it's like just my favorite fantasy books. It's the Night angel trilogy by Brent Weeks. What are you reading?

Oh, what am I reading?

Yeah, what are you reading right now?

Okay. I. Because I was, you know, still am a fiction editor, I spend most of my time, my free time, reading non fiction. Okay. Because it's very difficult for me to suspend my disbelief and books. And the other thing is, a friend of mine once said to me that it's like, I know where all the bodies are buried in every publication. So, like, knowing the editor of the guy and the thing and the agent and it's just not good. So I focus really on nonfiction, and I read a lot of stuff that is sort of strange. Okay. And doesn't seem to make any sense. The one couple of the books I'm reading now is a book on Washington's Crossing, which is written by a guy named David Hackett Fisher. And Fisher is sort of this really wonky kind of historian who really digs on getting into the realities of, you know, famous moments in time. And Washington's Crossing is all about, you know, that famous painting that's at the. At the Metropolitan Museum in New York of Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas night, you know, fighting the American Revolution. And so this is the story of what. What that was really about. Right. Like, because the painting is. It's more of a. It's a metaphor for. For. For the actual event more than it is. What the actual event was really all about. So I love reading nonfiction like that because it pulls back the curtain on a specific time and it shows the actuality of what it was like to be a general who's, you know, you're down to 10% of your men. It's freezing, it's snowing. The river is almost frozen. You've got to get across it to surprise an enemy that's beaten you in every single campaign so far. How do you raise the courage. How do you raise the courage of your men to go and fight that battle? Right. Yeah, that. That's what that really excites me is to reading stuff like that. The moment. It's like that pivotal moment, those pivotal Moments in life. And this is what great fiction and great non fiction do, is they take you to that place, that place where your back's against the wall. And it's either, hey, you know what, I'm going to throw it all down on this, or I quit. And that's what Washington was up against. You know, he's like, you know, I've got 10% of the guys that I started with and I've got to go across the river. Who's coming with me, right? And everybody did. They were all starving and they all did. Anyway, so that's, and that's the great thing about Fisher. He also wrote that book that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in the Tipping Point about Paul Revere's rye. You know what, what that actually was, as opposed to the British Are Coming. The British Are Coming. It was actually a lot more detailed than that. And who, who was Paul Revere Vere, really? You know what, what, why did, how was he able to do that? And one last book that I started reading last night, which, it's a biography of the musician Ryan Adams. And I don't know if you know anything about his work, but he's like this brilliant sort of strange person who does this amazing original music. And he just, yesterday he released. He basically took Taylor Swift's album 1989 and he redid it as, as him, right? So it's almost like, you know, Bruce Springsteen in era of writing Nebraska, found like the Pointer Sisters album of the time and made that, you know, it just doesn't make any sense. And so last night I was listening to, and I'm like, I got to know more about this guy because this is incredible and it's a great, it's a great, a great album and it gives me so much more respect for Taylor Swift now. So anyway, I bought it. I bought a biography of Ryan Adams and his first band called Whiskey Town last night by a guy named David Mancone. And it's, it's, it's terrific. So that's about, you know, that's another story about somebody who's just interesting. He's an interesting figure to me. I don't know why he makes the decisions he makes. And so I'm interested in reading the biography for no other reason than that, you know.

Okay, interesting. Okay.

Okay.

So.

Okay, I gotta jump back in genre.

Oh, sure.

Back on track. So you break and then, and then we'll try. We'll just start on this and I'll continue it. We'll continue in the next episode. So you break genre into five pieces. You have time, content, structure, reality and style. We're going to start with just the most interesting to me. So I like the reality kind of. So you have, you put in this kind of five leaf clothes clover that makes up the story.

So I like the reality one. So talk a little bit about.

And if I understand this right, what, what I'm, when I'm picking my genre, I'm not necessarily picking just like mystery. There's actually five decisions I gotta make and it's, it's time. Content, structure, style and reality. And so the content is more of the genre, like whether it's a western or a thriller or science fiction or whatever.

But you also have five other decisions to make. So one is reality and you have fantasy, realism, factualism and absurdism. So just talk a little bit about, like explain what the reality part of genre is all about and why. Those are the first four pieces we have to think about.

Okay.

Let me first, let me, let me really start with the simple one and then I'll get into reality. The very, very simple one is time. You know, how long is your, is your project going to be? Is it going to be a short story? Is it going to be a novel? Or is it going to be like a novella in film? Is it going to be a short film? Is it going to be a commercial? I mean, really understanding just how long you want to sustain your story is a very important decision. So obviously Tim, for you, you want to write novels, so you want long form. That's your, that's your time frame.

Well, but even in that. So I've been thinking about the whole serializing thing and I actually wanted to talk to you about that anyway. So.

The one that I remember doing this first, although no, he wasn't first, but in the self publishing world that hit it big was Hugh Howey with Wool. You know, he put out this short story.

And then he ended up writing four more pieces and that became the book Wool. And now he just did again with his book Beacon 23. And he did it on purpose from the beginning where it's like, okay, he knows the arc of the novel, but he put it out in five different pieces that would make up the final novel. So, so if I want to write a long novel, but perhaps I want to serialize it, what do I need to think about with that?

Well, you can absolutely do that. And knowing that you're going to do that from the start is going to be extremely helpful. So if you make that decision, lock it in Say to yourself, that's what I'm going to do. Don't say, well, maybe I'll serialize it. Because if you do, if you go wishy washy in any decision that you make, if you go wishy washyou're gonna not deliver in the way that you should. So if you're gonna make that commitment, make that commitment. Okay? So with that said, how do you break up a novel into a compelling series of five pieces or four pieces or whatever that goes to sort of the overall structure of your novel? How many acts are you going to have? And that's act, not ax.

So if I suspect that Q either he has probably two or three acts in the middle build of his story, he's got his opening.

His beginning hook, which is going to be one act, and his ending payoff is going to be one act. And you can read more about all that terminology and story grid, and we'll certainly talk about it in greater length later. But those five simple sections will help you figure out a lot of different things in planning your novel. So knowing that you're going to write long form, but you're going to break it into five pieces is going to be really helpful to you because you're going to know, okay, I've got to maintain. I've got to hook people not only with part one, part two, part three, part four, and part four, five all have to have an internal structure that has the same structure as the entire novel. So each one of those parts has to have a beginning hook, a middle build, and an ending payoff in it. So usually what you're going to do is you're going to end on a cliffhanger.

In your first four and then pay it off, really, at the final ending payoff in the last piece.

So what you're going to want to do is think to yourself, how am I going to get people to read the next piece? Where can I break my story that is the most exciting and the most tantalizing for them to want to go and download the next piece? So you're going to challenge yourself to create, you know, five major.

Climaxes and crises and climaxes that will compel people to go to the next one. And I think that's a pretty good idea. It's what I would recommend people do anyway, even if they weren't going to serialize it. Because the most important thing about telling a story is to maintain people's engagement. And if you challenge yourself to outdo yourself over and over again and reverse and turns, that will Keep people really glued to the page. You know, that's what it's all about. It's really about keeping people attached to the story and to find out what happens next. That's, that's, that's the main goal of any storyteller. You want people to wonder and be just compelled to find out what happens next. So say it's a long form piece. Five. Five pieces. Your. Your next.

The next question. And you want to. You want to go into reality, because that's. That's your thing. So let's go into the reality genre and, and try and pick that a little bit apart. The. The first reality genre is factualism. And these are stories that are based upon facts of history or biography. So what you're saying to the reader or to the viewer is that this story did happen, and it happened pretty much like you're seeing now. So stories like Serpico, which was based upon Frank Serpico's career as a police detective in New York city in the 1970s, that's factualism. That's a story based upon fact.

These are the ones that at the beginning, say, based on a true story.

Exactly. Like 12 years. 12 years a slave, which won the Oscar, I think, last year, that was based upon a book written by a guy who was a slave for 12 years, Argo. You know that movie with Ben Affleck. Yeah, yeah. That was based upon an article written about this scheme to get the hostages out of Iran. So those are stories that are based on fact. So factualism, you have, like, Lincoln, you know, the one. Steven Spielberg's movie. Okay. So that's one thing. And those are. Those are kind of fun to do because you have a lot of. You have a lot of meat on the bone that you can do the research to find out the actual stuff. So that's a pretty cool reality genre. Facts. And then there's realism. Now. Realism. What you're. What you're telling the viewer is this could happen in real life.

And that's where like. Like courtroom dramas and that kind of stuff.

Exactly. Like Law and Order or, you know, like a really good crime story featuring a detective that's very real, feels real. It's realism. You know, the. The precinct stories of Evan Hunter are great example of them. You know, just really good.

Crime TV is a good example. Svu, that kind of thing. Okay, so you have things that are based on facts that were true, things that could be true, that are based in real life. They could be true, but they're. They're made up. They're fictional. The third one is absurdism, which means this is not even close to reality. This is like. This is like a Looney Tunes cartoon where, you know, like, the roadrunner picks up a hole and throws it. And then the. The road. You know, the. The roadrunner falls in it or whatever. The coyote falls in it and falls to his death. And then magically, you know, it cuts, and then the. They're back where they started. Right, right. That means this isn't even remotely true. And absurdism is. It's not really something you really want to play around with in a novel because it's. It goes to the literary spectrum, and people really have little patience for absurdism because it's just.

Has no rules.

Exactly. And it's. It can get really. It. It makes people pissed off. Anyway, so the fourth one and then is fantasy. Now, this is the thing that. That I know you want to write in. And fantasies are really stories of imagination that they. They require a basic. You know, you've got to suspend your disbelief entirely.

But you do it in a. In a. In a set of rules, though. Like. Like if I was watching Star wars and, like, I don't know, something now. Now I can't think of an example. If somebody threw a fireball out of their hand, you know, like, at one point you'd be like, well, where'd that come from? That doesn't fit. What?

There are rules. A lightsaber works Fireball. No. Right, because they've established the rules that we don't control fireballs, but we control lightsabers. Right. The lightsaber is a. You know, it all has a. It has an internal.

Rational.

Way of thinking. Okay? So there. This is why you have all those great, you know, sort of nerds who. Who have these arguments about the. The rules of specific universes. Oh, no, you can't do that because fireballs aren't allowed on orc. You know, or whatever it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's great. I mean, people love rules. And when you create your own universe, you can create your own rules, but you have to abide by them. Like Animal Farm, George Orwell's sort of satirical novel about communism that had very internal rules. Like, the animals could. Could understand. They spoke English and they talked to each other, amongst each other, but the farmer couldn't hear them. You know, like they lived in this own little world, and that's a fantasy world.

Now, would you call the. Would you call factualism. Is that like. Is that nonfiction?

It's nonfiction with liberty. Okay. It's sort of the narrative nonfiction.

But so Eric Larson fits in that, right?

Eric Larson, yeah. Yeah.

He would say that it's pure nonfiction. I would say it's narrative nonfiction that skews more towards the fiction element than the. The nonfiction. There's a big debate in. In, you know, circles about narrative nonfiction is basically using the techniques of fiction for telling a true story.

Okay?

So a lot of people say, well, you know, you're manipulating the data so that you can tell a story that abides, you know, your genre's conventions. And that's true, whether or not, you know, that's true. I mean, we're starting to slice atoms here when you're talking about, you know, but narrative nonfiction, I would say Erik Larson stuff is very, very close to the truth. But it's a great story.

So when you are so back at. And we'll come back to this in another episode, but kind of. So here's how I think of reality genres. The reason you're picking this is you've got to figure out what set of rules that you're at asking people to read by or, like, how far they're going to suspend their disbelief. They're going to try to hear, but not hear.

And why is that important?

Well, it's important because.

When you are told a story, you want to know what you're in for, right? So if you don't tell this, say, for example, I write a fantasy novel that involves magical creatures.

And my publisher loves the novel, and they say, hey, let's not tell people it's fantasy. Let's just pretend that it's, you know, because it's got this great crime story in it. Let's just pretend that it's just a crime story, and we'll put a crime cover on it, and we won't tell anybody. Well, what's going to happen? And this is why this. Publishers would never do this anymore. What would happen is people would buy the crime. Readers would buy that book based upon the COVID and the promises made by that cover, and they would start to read it. And the minute people started acting magically, they would throw the book across the room because they'd be like, hey, nobody told me I had to suspend my disbelief. To think that people can, you know, point at each other and blow each other's heads off just with their fingers. Now, you can't do that. And I hate this book. And how dare you tell me this is one thing and then deliver another. So the reason why you have to tell them how much they have to Suspend their disbelief. Because people will suspend their disbelief. They don't have a problem doing it as long as they know what they're in for. It's like you want to surprise them, but that's a dirty trick. If you give them a dirty trick, they're gonna be angry at you. If you say, I'm gonna give you one thing and actually I'm gonna pull the rug out from you and say it's a completely different thing, then they're gonna get angry. So if you're gonna write a fantasy reality, you need to make it very clear very early in the story that it's fantasy even. So, just to take that example, I talked about the crime novel. If, like, Jonathan Letham actually wrote a fantastic crime novel called Gun, with occasional music. And this was a story that featured animals as I think it was like a kangaroo was the detective or something. And so what the publisher did is his hardcover publisher didn't really tell anybody that. And the hardcover didn't do so well because people went to it and they thought it was a hard boiled detective story. When they found out the lead character was a kangaroo, they're like, what is this? Right? So what's interesting, I was at St. Martin's Press at the time and one of, one of the parent companies is Tor, right? Tor, which is a great science fiction and fantasy publisher. So tour. And Jonathan Lethan's kind of a literary kind of guy. He was published by some like Random House or something. And the COVID for the hardcover didn't really tell anybody. It was a fantasy, hard boiled crime novel. So Tor's like, we love this. And they bought the paperback rights to it and sold maybe 5,000 copies an hardcover. And they put a kangaroo on the COVID and it sold like crazy.

Because their audience was like, oh, it's Tor. This is going to be fantasy. Oh my God, this is great. It's a send up of, you know, private eye, hardboiled detectives. So it never, it never works if you're trying to pull one over on the reader and not tell them how to suspend their disbelief. But once they know they're in, you know they're in. If, if somebody wants to read, you know, Thomas Pynchon, they know what they're in for anyway. Yeah. So that's why you have to tell them. That's why the reality genre is so important to make a decision. And the other thing is like, no, you can't, you can't go back and forth. You can't move from, you know, factualism to fantasy to realism to absurdism. Because then forget it. Nobody, you're. Nobody will. That's the mark of an amateur. That's somebody saying, oh, I was just riffing, man. And I thought it was cool the way the ice cube became a gun. It's like, no, you can't do that. It's either ice cubes can either become guns in that world for everyone or they can't.

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