The Tragic Typecasting Of Authors

Everyone knows that actors have a tendency to get typecast.  Audiences, and by extension, studios, want to see Jennifer Aniston playing the girl-next-door, Seth Rogen playing the lovable-but-bumbling-average-guy and Michelle Rodriguez playing the sexy-badass-tomboy.  Actors often rail against these labels, trying their damnedest to branch out and be seen as the next Meryl Streep or Daniel Day Lewis.  They want people to say, "Wow, she/he is so versatile!" A few achieve some degree of success in this pursuit but it's not the norm.

However the problem of being pigeonholed is nowhere near as challenging for actors as it is for authors.  Once someone has been labeled a paranormal author, or a romance author or (dare I say it) a chick lit author that's the lens that all that author's future work will be seen through and it's the standards of that genre that his or her novels will be judged by.  Even authors as renowned as Nora Roberts  are cautious enough to use pen-names when they stray from their original genre. New York Times bestselling novelist Jayne Ann Krentz  uses the pen-name Amanda Quick for her historical-romantic-suspense novels and her maiden name, Jayne Castle, when writing paranormal fiction. The truth is authors are almost never praised for being versatile.  Instead literary critics are more likely to make dire predictions about the results of the author's attempts to switch things up.  When Anne Rice recently published Angel Time, a time-travel book informed by her renewed Catholic faith The Library Journal stated that: "While smoothly written and full of Rice's noted descriptive detail, this title may disappoint fans of her wildly popular series about vampires and witches, while Christian readers who know Rice only as a paranormal writer will probably avoid it unless they have read her Jesus novels."

In other words they didn't have high hopes for the book's success not because it wasn't well written but because Rice tried something new. 

Now think about your first boyfriend and what he was like.  What if after a few months of dating him you were told that the only men you were ever going to be allowed to go out with were going to have to kinda look and act like him.  Doesn't matter how much you change as a person or how much your tastes have changed.  You made your choice when you were 16 (or however old you were when you started dating) and now you have to live with it.  For some people that works.  There are a few who end up marrying their first love and living happily ever after.  But for most people the idea of being so confined is positively suffocating.  Personally I'd like to branch out.  I want (and intend to) continue the Sophie series but I'd also like to write something that is dramatically different.  Yet I'm beginning to suspect that if I want to do that in the way I want to do it I'm going to have to take a cue from Roberts and Krentz and us a pseudonym.  Otherwise everything I write will be judged as chick-lit. For instance, So Much For My Happy Ending had a protagonist with a sense of humor but it was still darker and grittier than any of my other novels. Booklist described it as: "...a unique entry in the chick-lit genre and should appeal to those looking to move beyond typical fare." It simply never occurred to anyone that what made it a unique entry into the chick-lit genre was the fact that it wasn't really a chick lit book.  But people expected it to be and those who were looking for fluff were quite disappointed.  Most who weren't looking for fluff simply passed it by without even picking it up.  Now in addition to writing the sequel to Vows, Vendettas & A Little Black Dress I'm writing a novel that I think certain publishing-industry people would be more enthusiastic about if I was known for writing well-researched epic tales or fantasy novels but it's so different from anything that I'm known for a few (but thankfully not all) have pretty much dismissed the work out of hand. 

But I'm just too stubborn to allow myself to be boxed in like that.  I will continue to write the Sophie novels (even if I have to start self-publishing the damn things myself) and I'll come up with a nice alias and write other books in between.  I'm not going to let my first boyfriend define me.  It's not that my tastes have changed but they have expanded and I'm guessing that there are quite a few readers who are equally interested in diversity. 

In the end, what do I have to lose?

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Mystery Series
and
So Much For My Happy Ending
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