When is it Time to Change Genre? Writing for The Market. Or Not.

By Sharon Maas

Novelists write because we have stories to tell, and from the very beginning, I knew what my stories were going to be about. I’d grown up in Guyana, in the heyday of the colonial era, when it was still British Guiana, and that’s where I’d take my readers. Back to the post-colonial era, perhaps the happiest period of my life.

 Yes, yes, I know. Colonialism was bad and unjust and based on exploitation of poor countries by the United Kingdom. But that was not how many of us experienced it in the Fifties and Sixties. Life was good, at least if you were middle class: I had a very happy childhood, untroubled, surrounded by cousins and friends and good food and good times. 

I lived in Georgetown, the colony’s capital, a magical city of wide, green avenues shaded by flambouyant trees that bloomed flaming red in season and then dropped those blooms to create a gorgeous red carpet on the central walkway of our avenues. We cycled to school, alone, from a young age; Georgetown was a flat city by the sea, yet six feet below sea level, protected by a long thick Sea Wall, so most of the traffic consisted of bicycles, along with a few dray carts pulled by skinny horses and donkeys. All was calm and serene, and all of those who lived through those times look back with smiling nostalgia: those were indeed the days!

But my parents were politically active, especially my father, and I was very much aware of the problems lurking in the background. The situation of the Indian sugar-cane labourers, brought to the country after Emancipation of the slaves, was not good; enormous steps had been taken to improve their lot, even from the top down through the reformist Booker Chairman Jock Campbell, (later Lord Campbell of Eskane). But the struggle was on for Independence, and there was much infighting between the two major racial groups, Indians and Africans, for control. Fear of Communism from the US and the UK led to even more conflict. All this offered much raw material for an up-and-coming novelist.

When I wrote my first novel, I knew that this was the milieu it would be set in; always a ravenous reader, I had, while growing up, always missed books set in my own country, and I felt called to write them. I didn’t spare a single thought for that juggernaut hanging over the heads of twenty-first century authors: The Market. No: I’d write good stories, with love, and readers would read them, and love them. I didn’t think beyond that; I certainly didn’t think that “readers would not want to read novels set in British Guiana”. 

That first book, Of Marriageable Age, had been quickly and eagerly snapped up, bought at auction for a good advance by HarperCollins and sold to several European countries. Its setting was India and colonial British Guiana, and it was universally loved. I thought my sun had risen and went on to write another book set in BG. HarperCollins rejected it. They’d loved OMA because of the Indian setting. 

British Guiana?  Too obscure a setting.  Nobody cared about British Guiana. They didn’t even know where it was and wouldn’t read books set there. Nobody, of course, meaning nobody in the UK or the US, or Canada and Australia. Guyana was not a money-maker. The Market had spoken.

I didn’t believe it. Of course they cared, I thought; British readers especially! This was THEIR ex-colony, part of the Empire; surely, they’d love to sink into stories set there, as long as they were well written! 

And so, after HarperCollins rejected my Guyana-set book, I went on to write several more post-colonial novels, all of which, over the years, were rejected by every agent on both sides of the pond. So I was delighted when Bookouture, a new digital-first publisher, agreed to sign me on. I couldn’t wait to see the four Quint Chronicles finally out there. It was a family saga set among the BG sugar plantations and the planters and the labourers, with all the inherent conflicts and dramas of the era.

But The Quint Chronicles sold dismally. Though the books got good reviews, sales in no way measured up to those of Of Marriageable Age, and I was forced to see the truth through non-biased, realistic eyes: if I wanted to keep on writing, I needed to move on. Change the subject, change genre. 

I conceded. I did want to develop as a writer, and obviously hoped to one day earn solid royalties; if Guyana was not the key, I really had no option. By now I was a confident writer, able to look beyond my own inclinations and personal preferences. I only needed a nudge in the right direction. Looking at the best-selling genres —  Romance, Crime, Thriller — I did not feel a natural affinity. I simply could not write only for The Market. And then…

“Do you think you could write a World War 2 novel?” my Bookouture editor asked, and that was it. Yes! Of course! A big, big yes, and I knew the exact specifics. 

My novel would be set in Alsace, France. Alsace! Back to Alsace! You see, one of the essentials of my novels is this: I must know the setting. I must love the setting. I must love the setting enough to create characters that fit seamlessly into it, characters who tell me a story that explains that setting and enriches it not only for me, but for the reader.

Why Alsace? Well, again, the explanation is in my own past. Back in the 70s, I had met a woman in India who took me under her wing. Her name was Trudel; she was German but had been born in a village called Ribeauvillé in the French province of Alsace, which shares a border with Germany. In fact, the only French border with Germany is in Alsace.

Trudel was old and had retired to her province of birth with her husband; they now lived on a beautiful hillside chalet in the forested woods about half an hour from Colmar. Trudel invited me to stay with her one summer, and I was hooked. 

The rolling hills of Alsace, covered in vineyards; the charming villages with their crooked half-timbered houses, straight out of Grimm’s fairytales; the purple mountains in the background; the glorious weather! I loved it and returned summer after summer. Trudel became an Ersatz-mother to me, and Ersatz-grandmother to my two children. 

Trudel had lived through the war, and had many personal anecdotes of those times, some of which I adapted to fit my WW2 novels; in Soldier’s Girl, it’s the story of bribing the German occupying forces with bottles of excellent wine! Trudel died at the age of 102, the only centenarian I’ve ever known; a living history book.

Well, no question: of course I would set my first WW2 novel in Alsace! I wasn’t even aware of the pivotal role Alsace had played in the war. Hardly anybody, beyond dedicated history buffs, knows that Alsace was not just occupied: it was actually annexed by Germany, meaning, it became part of Germany; German soldiers swarmed through the province, forcing everyone to become German immediately. They had to take on German names, speak German, destroy everything French. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker: all shop signs had to be replaced. Jacques became Hans. French teachers replaced by Germans. French books burnt. Of course, the Alsatians, a very proud people with their own culture and even their own language, resented it! 

But what a wonderful, captivating setting for a WW2 novel! Especially since, as I learned with more research, that the Alsace, and the town of Colmar specifically, was the very last place in France to be freed. General Eisenhower wasn’t interested in fighting for it, and President Roosevelt was ready to cede it to Hitler. But General deGaulle insisted. The final battles there were horrific, for the Alsace was precious to both France and Germany. Much blood was shed there in the final months of the war. And the locals fought too.

That fight of the local Alsatians became the background to the story that ended up as The Soldier’s Girl in 2018 and is now to be republished as Soldier’s Girl. All I needed, now, were characters with a story to tell, set against this rich and thrilling background. 

The story that came, as if called out from the past, simply flowed as the characters revealed themselves one by one: Sibyl, an English nurse turned SOE secret agent, turned MI6 honeytrap spy; Jacques, her dearest childhood friend, now a Resistance fighter. Last but not least, Major Wolfgang von Haagen, the intimidating German Commander of Colmar who slowly reveals his softer side: they all walked straight into my heart, and onto my laptop. They are the protagonists who would bring this story to life. 

Soldier’s Girl was the first of my books, I have to say, that actually made me cry at the end. Revising it now, for the new edition, I cried again. That’s why, of all the books I’ve written, this is the one that, I believe, most deserves a new lease on life. It’s a story that longed to be told, and here it is in a new and improved version. It became the first in a three-part series, and, I’ve now discovered, definitely needs a sequel, which I’ll have to write. Oh dear…

So, goodbye to Guyana, and welcome to Alsace. I made that leap, and gladly; it was a change of genre that came organically. Not because The Market demanded it, but because my heart did. That’s how it should be.

—

Sharon Maas was born into a prominent political family in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1951. She was educated in England, Guyana, and, later, Germany. After leaving school, she worked as a trainee reporter with the Guyana Graphic in Georgetown and later wrote feature articles for the Sunday Chronicle as a staff journalist.

Her first novel, Of Marriageable Age, is set in Guyana and India and was published by HarperCollins in 1999. In 2014 she moved to Bookouture, and now has sixteen novels under her belt. Her books span continents, cultures, and eras. From the sugar plantations of colonial British Guiana in South America, to the French battlefields of World War Two, to the present-day brothels of Mumbai and the rice-fields and villages of South India, Sharon never runs out of stories for the armchair traveller.

SOLDIER’S GIRL

(Previously published by Bookouture as The Soldier’s Girl.)

“Could you kill a Nazi, Miss Lake? Or, in the moment of killing, would you remember his mother’s grief—and let yourself be killed instead?”
It is the most extraordinary of job interviews, for the most extraordinary of jobs. In the final year of WWII, Sibyl, an English nurse, volunteers to help free Alsace—the beloved province of her childhood—from Nazi control. Her mission: to train and lead a band of resistance fighters, men commanded by Jacques, once her closest friend and now a hardened leader of the underground.

But nothing has prepared Sibyl for Major Wolfgang von Haagen, the German officer in charge of Colmar. Believing her to be a cobbler’s assistant, von Haagen begins to care for her—and to confide in her. London quickly sees an opportunity, ordering Sibyl to nurture his affections and turn them into weapons. Reluctantly, she becomes the bait in a treacherous honeytrap, caught between loyalty to her cause and the stirrings of her conscience. For von Haagen is no ruthless brute; and his love is true.
As Hitler demands Colmar be held at any cost, Sibyl must choose between deception and truth, love and betrayal, duty and survival. One little misstep could doom not only her mission—but the fate of an entire province.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing