When what you write isn’t what you read

It all started a week or so ago when Jim Winter resuscitated the old “literary/genre” debate in a recent post, and then Ray Banks followed suit in a spirited fashion. But one thing Ray said really struck home with me:

While I’m racking up the Hail Marys, I might as well confess this too: I didn’t read a hell of a lot of crime fiction when I embarked on The Big Blind. Jim Thompson was an obvious influence, but then so was Chuck Palahniuk. So was Charles Bukowski. So were Ken Kesey, John Fante, Raymond Carver and Hunter S. Thompson. While arguments could be made for Palahniuk as a genre writer in literary clothing (what’s more noir than transgressive fiction?), in the Ira Levin mode, I never set out to be a crime writer.

I can’t say I’m terribly surprised to hear this, considering Banks’ voice and the way the story of THE BIG BLIND unfolds. But it also brings up a broader question, one that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: when do you realize that the kinds of books you love to read aren’t necessarily what you’re cut out to write?

Obviously, the vast majority of what I read now are crime novels. Though much of it is due to having to write a column every month (never mind fueling this site), I wouldn’t keep reading them if I didn’t love the best of what the genre has to offer. But I cannot count the number of times that, about a page or two into a given book, a little voice in my brain either goes, “No way I can write like this” or “I’m really not interested in writing like this.”

I don’t want to get into a long-winded manifesto about it, but I can safely say that at the moment, I’m not terribly interested in writing a very long series, using the traditional story structure of a crime novel (read: whodunit), and especially in spending the bulk of my time and energy building things up to an expected (or unexpected) resolution. And although I am interested in having some kind of crime as a focal point of whatever I write, I suspect that focus will be equally mixed with a more general focus on character conflict, especially of the religious variety.

Which isn’t to say that different story ideas won’t show up. I hope they do, because I don’t want to be one of these people whose best ideas were generated in my earliest years. But since the last three short stories I wrote had some kind of Jewish theme, since the project I’m working on has one, and since the next story I think I want to write will have one, well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what ultimately interests me.

And that’s why it’s been so important for me to read outside crime fiction, to find other voices — fiction or non-fiction — that speak to me, and that will aid me in discovering my own.  Because much as I love the genre, I’m not certain that the stories I want to tell will necessarily fit within its inherent constraints.

To flip the topic another way, it’s interesting to me that a number of crime writers began writing science fiction before they turned their attention to the mystery novel. I chalked it up to their early influences, reading SF novels as teens and being wowed and wanting to write like that. But then, when it didn’t work — in the forms of novels in drawers or those that simply didn’t sell — they tried something different, a much better fit for their natural voices: crime fiction.

But I’d like to hear more about this from those who did make the switch — what finally convinced you to do so? And for other crime writers, did you always want to write such stories? And how much does what you read match what you write?