As a writer I like to draw
outside the lines of genre. I cross the borders of sci-fi and fantasy and
realistic fiction and mystery and literary fiction and comedy and drama because
a mix of genres helps me find the spark(s) that drive my story and give form
and structure to it. Genres are all well and good if that’s where your work
naturally fits. Mine doesn’t. I have to wander. Good for me. Not necessarily
good for marketing.
A lot of people call the kind of
fiction I’m talking about genre bending, but I think of it more as genre
blending. I end up wandering in and out of genres and taking what I can from
each that helps me tell my story.
People who sell books, as opposed
to write them, like genres. They want to be able to put fiction in a neat
category for the purposes of drawing a particular audience. (More true of adult
novels than YA) Completely understandable. It makes it easier to sell a book if
the seller can identify the audience and then try to find ways to attract that
audience to a novel. Publishers
like genre and bookstores like genre. But here's the thing about fiction. It's
not cooperative. There's something inherently rebellious about writing fiction.
And there are writers who find themselves, even if they begin writing in a
certain genre they love to read, wandering. Sometimes they’ll try to restrict
themselves or pull their story back a certain way so they don’t loose their
genre place. I think this can deflate certain stories, allow a certain
inauthenticity to creep in, rob them of a richness a mix of genres might give.
I think, even though it may make
your work harder to sell, you have to tell the story you have to tell. You
gotta be who you gotta be. Eventually, readers will find you.
I like to read in many genres.
Literary because I love language and character driven stories. Sci-Fi for ideas—especially the strange
ones—fantasy because the world needs magic and is full of mystery, mystery for
story and entertainment…Of course I’m most drawn to works that might be presented
as belonging to a certain genre but that I see as blending more than one. Kurt
Vonnegut, for instance, who mixed realism with science fiction and comedy with
drama and social criticism and lord knows what else to create a potent mix. GG
Marquez mixed fantastical events and realistic fiction so well critics decided
to give him his own genre: magical realism. Kate Atkinson’s mysteries have elements of literary fiction
and her literary fiction has elements of mystery. These are just a few. There are many.
I love to write. I love to genre
blend. I am frustrated that the market often struggles to accept good stories
that blend genres but I have to write what excites me. I know there are readers
out there like me who love to read books that artfully blend and bend genre and
make something different, unusual, unique. I like a lot of books but what I’m
looking for are books to fall in love with.
For me, that’s often a book that
doesn’t neatly fit into any category.