Genre and how to use it with true stories
A great tool for framing your story and to help you pitch agents, publishers and TV producers
Welcome to this week’s A-B-C of Writing True Stories newsletter.
Thank you to those who sent compliments or asked about writing in general.
One person asked if you need permission from the relatives of victims when writing true crime. This is a great question! I won’t address it here today, but the ethics of writing about real people and events, and especially true crime, is something I will look at in future newsletters.
So watch this space!
Please keep your comments coming, and if you have burning topics, let me know and I will tailor future newsletters to them.
OK, let’s get on with this week’s subject.
Genre
In some literary circles genre is a dirty word. In the eyes of purists it smacks of hack work, melodrama, flat characterisation and writing by numbers.
I couldn’t disagree more!
For me, genre comes under the same heading as craft: first learn how to use the tools and the forms before breaking the rules.
A carpenter must learn the fundamentals of well established forms: a table, a chair, a cabinet. Learning to use the tried and tested components of these forms such as dovetail joints and legs is part of the process of becoming a carpenter.
In writing, genre provides a solid form that works.
But it is a starting point from which great innovation can spring.
Genre + true stories?
You’re probably wondering what all this has to do with writing true stories. Genre is for fiction, surely?
Think again.
Genre is a really powerful shorthand that we all instinctively understand. It’s a powerful tool for quickly communicating your story to agents, publishers and readers.
If I tell you my story is about a heist you know what I’m talking about. You might think Ocean’s Eleven or The Italian Job. Both fictional, of course. But the movie Hatton Garden Job, starring Michael Caine, is about a real heist.
Gangsters? You might think of The Godfather or Goodfellas. Again, fiction. But Legend starring Tom Hardy as Ronnie and Reggie Kray is based on John Pearson’s brilliant narrative nonfiction book The Profession of Violence. Pearson also wrote Painfully Rich, a creative nonfiction account of the Getty dynasty. Ridley Scott turned the book into All The Money In The World. The genre? A kidnap story.
Let’s take further examples of narrative nonfiction books that became successful movies or TV series. Then let’s find the genre.
Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher? A Wilkie Collins-style murder mystery.
Touching the Void by Joe Simpson or Piers Paul Read’s Alive! — both are survival-against-the-odds stories.
Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand is an incredibly moving sports underdog story. Scott Murray and Simon Farnaby’s Phantom of the Open: Maurice Flitcroft, the World’s Worst Golfer is also a sports underdog story. It’s brilliantly funny and is currently being made into a movie starring Mark Rylance.
Each one is unique, true to its source and worth a few hours of your time. Rather than being limited by their genre, they have taken flight like majestic birds, and have elevated their forms.
Here are some more examples, all incredibly successful books with universal stories that became classic films and TV shows:
Prison dramas
The Birdman of Alcatraz by Thomas E. Gaddis
Papillon by Henri Charriere. The massive blockbuster of the 1970s, turned into an equally major blockbuster movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. It is an enduring tale (even if the veracity of some of Charriere’s narrative is disputed) as it covers universal themes of revenge and endurance. It was remade for a modern audience starring Charlie Hunnam.
Trial By Fire by David Grann (originally a New Yorker magazine feature, taken from Grann’s superb book The Devil and Sherlock Holmes)
Murder (true crime)
10 Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy
Zodiac by Robert Graysmith
The Murders at White House Farm by Carol Ann Lee
Killing for Company by Brian Masters (about serial killer Dennis Nilsen and adapted by ITV as Des starring David Tennant)
On the Trail of the Serpent: The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj by Richard Neville and Julie Clarke (adapted as BBC1’s The Serpent)
The Gamblers by John Pearson (about Lord Lucan, adapted by ITV)
War stories
The Great Escape, The Dam Busters, Reach for the Sky, all by Paul Brickhill
The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan
Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (also has elements of a sports underdog story)
The Railway Man, by Eric Lomax
Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose
Disasters
A Night To Remember (about the Titanic) by Walter Lord
Alive! by Piers Paul Read (about a rugby team whose plane crashes in the Andes and the horrors that follow)
The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger
A Captain’s Duty by Richard Phillips (adapted into Captain Phillips starring Tom Hanks; this is a pirate story and also a kidnap story)
Sports stories
Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation by John Carlin (turned into Invictus starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman)
Moneyball by Michael Lewis
Scandals (political and financial)
A Very English Scandal by John Preston (about the Jeremy Thorpe/Norman Scott case)
The Big Short by Michael Lewis
All The President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Underdogs who achieve great things
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Longitude by Dava Sobel
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester (the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of its more unusual contributors — a convicted murderer held at Broadmoor)
The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner
Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen by Jane Hawking (the memoir on which The Theory of Everything was based)
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges (the basis for The Imitation Game)
Eccentric underdogs
The Phantom of the Open: Maurice Flitcroft, the World’s Worst Golfer by Scott Murray and Simon Farnaby
One Good Run by Tim Hanna (turned into the charming movie The World’s Fastest Indian starring Anthony Hopkins)
Find your own examples
These are just some examples off the top of my head. You will have your own. You will find other genres — true rom coms, medical dramas, school stories. Have fun identifying them.
Wear your genre lightly — and don’t be a slave to it
Genre in isolation doesn’t guarantee success. There are so many other factors at work — theme, character, authorial voice (all of which I will look at in forthcoming newsletters).
As a new writer you may resist the notion of selling and marketing your work.
But if you want to find a big audience, to make a living as a writer, then you have to understand that publishing (and TV and film) is a business.
Therefore analysing genre is crucial when you are pitching your work. You will turn a corner when you realise readers and audiences pay for something they want. Genres are popular with readers because they are tried and tested forms. They work!
Don’t look down on them, don’t be limited by them, use them to focus your story and to persuade somebody to buy your work.
Questions for you to take away:
In each newsletter I will give you some questions to ponder. Consider it homework!
Take your idea for a true story — which genre or genres could it fit into?
Which other book/film is it similar to?
Which genre does that successful story fit into?
Can you combine more than one genre? How?
Reading recommendations:
This week I recommend looking at the books I mentioned above and watch the movies based on them.
Think how the authors might have pitched their original books. And then ask yourself what would have attracted the film producers to option them. What role would genre have played in their decision-making?
Look at the credits — look out for ‘Based on the book by…’ — and imagine your own book featuring in a TV series or film in the future.
Think about how and why genre is important in these successes in finding large, global audiences.
Thank you and I hope you have found this useful. Let me know how you get on.