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Dear Reader,
I'm on vacation this week and author Genevieve Cogman has offered to pen today's column.
Genevieve Cogman is a freelance author, and our guest columnist today. She has written for several role-playing game companies, and currently works for the NHS in England as a clinical classifications specialist. Genevieve is the author of the Invisible Library series, including The Masked City and The Invisible Library.
Penguin Random House is giving away five copies of The Invisible Library. To enter, email: [email protected]
Welcome to the book club, author Genevieve Cogman...
When I was walking home past the railway station today, I ended up in the middle of a crowd of people, idly staring at the back of the woman walking immediately in front of me.
She had gorgeous tattoos, visible because her top was cut low at the back due to the hot weather. In the middle of her back there was a group of red roses, surrounded by black flames and incoming rays of dark light, with bluebirds on either side nose-diving towards it. She also had roses and greenery on her lower legs. I didn't get to see any more detail, because at that point our paths diverged and it would have become creepy for me to be staring at her. (Rather than vaguely justifiable due to the fact that I was walking directly behind her.)
Roses, black flames, rays of dark light, bluebirds--and yet it all worked as a whole.
It made me think of an article on colour theory which had been in one of my patchwork magazines (one of my hobbies is patchwork and quilting), which had talked about how colours on completely opposite sides of the colour wheel (I think the term was complementary colours) can work together in a quilt. But it also made me think about how an author can throw in multiple different elements in a novel, even if they might be from different genres or contrasting background settings, and still end up with a harmonious result.
Genre is an important tool in designing what an author's writing, and understanding how it works and creating a self-consistent end product. But though it's the author's responsibility to understand the "rules" of their genre and to keep the story consistent, it is also the author's choice where they bend or break those rules. We can have historical vampire detective stories, space-travelling dragons, zeppelin-using Sidhe, and Sherlock Holmes investigating Lovecraft or Cenobites. They may be bad, or they may be good, but it's the writing that makes them good or bad, rather than the action of mixing genres.
The woman in front of me at the station had chosen to put red roses and bluebirds together with black flames and dark rays of light. She had picked specific images from very different contexts, and chosen the pattern in which she wanted them to all be put together, and it looked 'awesome.'
--Genevieve Cogman
To send a note to Genevieve Cogman, email: [email protected]
* I hope you enjoyed reading today's guest column. If you're one of the winners, or your entry is an honorable mention in this year's Write a DearReader contest, it will be featured as a guest column. Cash prizes, rules and deadlines, along with last year's winning entries, read all about them at: http://www.dearreader.com/contest2016/index.html
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
* This month's Penguin Classics book is PERCHANCE TO DREAM: Selected Stories, by Charles Beaumont. Start reading now and don't forget to enter the drawing for your chance to win a Penguin tote bag: http://www.supportlibrary.com/bc/v.cfm?L=drclassqqxqZ1AFE3FA745F&c=CLASSICS
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