7 Genres for Your Novel and How to Choose the Right One

“Go to the bookstore and you’ll see my new book on the shelves,” said a recently published author. Her book was a fictionalised account of her spiritual journey and finding God a year after her divorce. Two days later, I was at the Customer Services desk of the bookstore, giving the lady the title of the book, name of author and even the ISBN. This was after I’d already looked for the book in the ‘Literature’, ‘Asian Writers’ and ‘New Releases’ parts of the Fiction section. The lady entered all the details into the computer and voilà, she knew where the book was.

“Follow me, Miss,” she said and we went in search of the book.

Can you guess under which section my friend’s book was placed? Self-help. How could a fictionalised account of a woman’s journey be classified as ‘Self-help’? The book was part fiction. Surely, we should have looked at shelves somewhere near the Fiction section?

The lady from Customer Services said that it was the author who had given them this classification. My friend denied this and said that she’d given her book to the distributors and left it to them to sort out how the bookstores would classify her book.

I didn’t see the need to probe the matter any further, but it made me aware of the possibility that the responsibility of classification of books rests on the shoulders of the author or aspiring novelist. So, let’s see if we can help an aspiring novelist in this matter.

One of the first issues an aspiring novelist will have to consider, therefore, is the type of novel he’d like to write. It might seem straightforward, but any published author will admit that this is not necessarily so. For one, the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a novel in the following terms: ‘a fictitious prose story of book length.’ A novel could be 50,000 words long. It could be 150,000 words long. What happens if the work is part fiction? Indeed, Miguel Syjuco, when asked about how much reality was reflected in his novels, further illustrates this point: “I like the old writer’s cliché that applies to my book – everything in this book is true, and some of it might even be factual.”

Furthermore, enter any bookshop and it will become obvious that there are hundreds of different types of novels

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How to Be Happy Inside and Out

You’re delighted with the bonus you’ve received for a job well done. You spend the holidays with your family and it’s a happy time. A month later, you find that you’ve been promoted and this adds to your happiness. By the end of the month, though, that happiness seems to have paled. A mere six weeks later, you admit that this is a recurring pattern in your life where your initial happiness gives way to sadness; after all, these are yet another set of achievements that you’ve checked off your list. It’s almost as if that absolute happiness is fleeting and momentary.

There are many schools of thought that will say that the reason for such fleeting emotions is because the happiness wasn’t from ‘within’. It was cursory and you can only feel truly happy if you’re happy ‘inside’. Is it possible to be both happy inside and outside? Here is a story that I have adapted and called, ‘Jasper, the Frog’ to demonstrate how one can learn to become absolutely happy (http://forum.yogananda.net/index.php?/topic/7080-story-of-a-deaf-frog/ )

Once upon a time, a group of frogs organised a race where the goal was to reach the top of a high mountain. A big crowd gathered throughout the route to provide moral support for the contestants. In truth, no one thought that such tiny frogs would reach the top of the mountain. True enough, along the way, many of the contestants heard things like, “Oh, it’s way too difficult; no one will ever make it to the top,” or “This mountain is too high.” One by one, tiny frogs collapsed in sheer exhaustion, gave up or slowed down.

The few who carried on regardless included one old frog called Jasper. Everyone expected Jasper to collapse at any time and medical aid was placed on standby. They shouted at him to stop and he looked at them, smiled and carried on up the hill. He was being stubborn and refusing to listen to their advice. Finally, at the top of the mountain, Jasper was the only one left standing. Naturally, he won the race.

Many of the other frogs wanted to know how he’d done this incredible feat. Before he answered all their questions, though, he thanked them all for being there. Other frogs also observed that Jasper made no eye contact with them and stared only at their

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Years before Age: 10 Steps to Success

“After 40, you should be valued for your experience, know-how and judgement, rather than for the ability to work 18 hours every day.” (Korda, Michael. “Ten Steps to Success Before 40.” Reader’s Digest. Jan 1988. 49-51). Korda, the article also states, was editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and author of half a dozen books, including the best-sellers Power!, Success! and Queenie.

The main premise of Korda’s article is that if you do the ‘right things’ before you’re 40, you will be reap the rewards thereafter. This article was published more than 30 years ago. The time in between has certainly seen many changes and today there are many people who change their careers in their 30s. They are unable to the ‘right things’ before 40 and have had to start all over again. It is probably because they were unable to decide what careers to pursue at a time in their lives when everything was in a state of flux: they had just finished school, they were about to leave the comfort of their homes for the first time, they were leaving their friends behind and so on. It took time for them to realise, accept and have the courage to leave the profession or vocation they chose at 20 and do something that they were passionate about.

Furthermore, once a specific career path has been chosen, at whatever age, it’s not the age that matters, but the length of time spent on this path that determines success. It is safe to say that an average time to succeed in any given profession or vocation – be it writing, medicine, law, teaching or running your own company – is between 15 and 20 years. For example, it is said that, ‘Mantel, 62, is an overnight sensation 20 years in the making.’ (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/person/hilary-mantel). Rushdie suggests in his memoir, Joseph Anton, that he started his writing career in his early 20s and achieved success when he was close to 40.

Therefore, it is possible to re-word the opening line of this article and say “After 20 years at a particular profession/vocation, you should be valued for your experience, know-how and judgement.” Take this further and replace the words ‘before 40’ with ‘after 20 years’ in the rest of Korda’s article, and the 10 things he suggests you do right

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‘Circum’ – ‘Scum’: Small Difference?

“My husband cannot come to kenduri because in our kampung, we have scum session,” said this gentle lady I was giving a lift to. She was very helpful to our family in the last few days as she had been assisting with the housework. She explained that she needed to return home early because her niece was getting married in the evening and she wanted to attend the festivities at the ‘kenduri’.

I smiled politely even though I had no clue what she was saying. In those split seconds before she next spoke, I wondered what she meant by ‘scum session’. Did it have something to do with rugby? It couldn’t be because the word used in the game was more likely to be scrum. Besides, a kampung person who managed a paddy field in the outskirts of Alor Setar was more likely to play sepak takraw than rugby.

Could it be a ‘gotong royong’ session? A community-based activity where all the villagers were getting together to clean the place?

“You know,” she spoke again, “scum session. Orang Melayu kata sunat.”

I quickly glanced out the window. I didn’t want her to see my smile and feel hurt. What she’d meant to say was that she had to leave early and her husband couldn’t accompany her to the wedding feast because he was involved in the circumcision ceremony of several young boys in the kampung.

Later in the day, it got me thinking about where we should go to learn how to say something correctly. In the time of dot i.e. when I was born and growing up, we turned to the dictionary to discover anything at all about words. We looked at it to find the definition for a word, how to use that word correctly or even how to pronounce it.

Take a word like ‘albeit’. A friend insists that it’s pronounced as ‘al-bight’ although I’ve always thought it should be ‘all-be-it’. Out comes our trusty dictionary. The first step is to find the word. Here’s an image of the one in ours: Then I look at the specific part that teaches you how to pronounce that particular word.

Cross-reference this with the information provided on the page called ‘Pronunciation Symbols’ located at the front

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