For a long time, I didn’t know what to call what I write, which is fine in one respect because I’ve never been particularly tied down in what I write. One of my favorite authors is Kazuo Ishiguro, and one of the things I love about him is that he isn’t tied down to any one genre. He writes historical fiction, fantasy, dystopian, family drama–all of it. I’ve also allowed myself the run of my imagination, which is wonderful for my creativity but not so wonderful when I try to figure out how to categorize my books.
How the words read on the page is important to me. Like Dickens, I write for the “music” of the language. And yet I use what has been called a literary style to write what might be considered genre (historical, Gothic) stories.
Recently, I learned a new word that seems to bridge that gap–upmarket. I had an aha! moment when I learned what upmarket fiction means because it seems to combine the two things I do when I tell a story.
Upmarket fiction is a category that sits between literary fiction and commercial or genre fiction, meaning that it has the accessibility and plot-driven appeal of commercial fiction, but it also has the deeper characterization, thematic richness, and prose quality more often associated with literary fiction. Think of upmarket fiction as fiction that a wide audience will enjoy reading for the story, but it also has something meaningful to say and is written with care. It tends to feature complex characters with emotional depth and real-world themes while still being engaging rather than experimental.
Some more well-known examples include The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty, A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. These books were all bestsellers with broad appeal, but they also tackled serious themes and featured layered characters. The term upmarket is more commonly used in the publishing industry, usually by agents and editors to help categorize manuscripts and market books to the right audience.
When I first read The Secret History by Donna Tartt, I remember feeling as if something unlocked in me. The novel was intelligent and lush and morally complex, and I devoured it. I read that long book in something like two days because I had to know what would happen next. When I read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, I felt that same sensation of being swept away by beautiful language and a compelling story.
In my own stories, I tend to begin with mood, and nearly all of my stories begin with a moment where I set the scene. But mood or even beautiful language alone are not enough. There needs to be a compelling story. Something must be at stake. Many of my characters live in moral gray spaces, and I’m not interested in easy outcomes. Yes, some of my stories have happily ever afters, but I’m less interested in redemption than in the consequences of our actions. Sure, there are mysteries to solve in many of my stories, but there are also reckonings. If you’ve read any of my books, you know that layered characters are always my primary goal.
The upmarket fiction label allows me to do both, meaning I can take care with crafting the language on the page and setting the atmosphere but I can also share good stories, sometimes with high stakes. I think books like The Secret History and The Night Circus do an amazing job tying the two sides of the coin–literary fiction and genre fiction–together. I feel as if I’ve won a prize by finding a term to describe what I’ve been trying to do with my fiction for the last 15 years, which is to present readers with a good story well told that is written in language that sets the atmosphere and flows.