Turns out that “dramedy” is an actual term. TV Guide used it to describe Gilmore Girls. That’s all the research I got done yesterday, although I did take a stab at writing the cover letter and also figured out someone who writes close to what I hope Remodeling Eden turned out to be. Sadly, I am not of Lorrie Moore’s ilk, although I admire her writing very much.
I don’t think we get to choose what kind of writer we become. If we did, I’d write vivid edgy sentences like Lorrie Moore or funny and true stories like Jennifer Crusie or lush effulgent novellas like Jim Harrison. At the very least, my famous uncle would give me lots of writing advice and introduce me to his agent and editor. That was a wishful joke. I am not actually related to Jim Harrison except in the sense that we’re all more closely related than we might guess, having come out of a fairly small gene pool way back when.
In his new book, The Summer He Didn’t Die, Harrison eschews commas. Only a highly respected literary writer can get away with that. My lit class is reading The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald didn’t use commas either. And Max Perkins was his editor, so there’s something there. Something cool and stylized about ignoring rules of grammar. The other thing Harrison does that nobody else could get away with except maybe Stephen King is his form. Harrison writes novellas, a form almost unheard of these days except when he does it. In that way, I could be like him, as I tend to write really short novels. Also, we both live in Michigan. But that’s about where the similarities end.
So, I’ve figured out my place in the market, but I haven’t come up with a way to say it without sounding like I think I’m as excellent a writer as Sara Lewis. Because I’m not and I don’t. It’s just that our work has roughly the same measures of humor and drama.
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