The Genre Straitjacket...

Pff, genre restriction. No, I don't restrict myself to one genre. The main problem for me is deciding which genre most of my stuff belongs in. And, yes, I ended a sentence in a preposition. Go ahead and load the cannons.

If someone wants to restrict themselves to one genre, what's wrong with that? It's probably because that's the genre they read, like the best, and write the best. Plus, the more they focus on that genre, the better they'll get at that type of writing.

There's nothing wrong with putting a straitjacket on yourself. It's only wrong when someone else puts the straitjacket on you against your will.

Very hard to sell books if you don't restrict yourself to a genre. There are exceptions, of course, but most writers stay in one category throughout their careers. Some bend that category, yes, but they are still marketed and identified in a certain genre.

I want to write in one genre. Why? Because that's what I feel I do well. I'm not interested in really anything else other than what I'm doing.

The purpose of commercial fiction is getting your name out there so that it's recognized. Pre-orders on Amazon.com and all that. If you write a thriller, and then write a romance, and then a sci-fi mindbender, you run the risk of losing that core audience. Publishers get nervous. Actually, you probably will have trouble finding a publisher if that's your mission.

A teacher of mine talked about this once. She said it was so hard for her to find publishers because she was doing something different every time she wrote. There's something liberating about that, I guess...but there's also something satisfying about stretching the boundaries of the genre that you're writing in, redefining it -- and that's what I'm trying to do.

Barbarique said:

Well, possibly so. On the other hand, let's say someone wants to write like Asimov or Heinlein; should they then never read Dickens, Twain, Dreiser, Austen, or Faulkner? Wouldn't doing so lessen their appreciation of --and ability to effectively wield-- the English language?

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Nah, I don't think so. Some people like one or two genres, but just because that's what they enjoy doesn't mean they aren't well read in other areas. I think one of the most important things in writing is to write what you love. If you read Twain, Dickens, Faulkner, and Asimov, but you only REALLY enjoy Asimov, chances are you'd be a drab author in the genres that aren't your passion.

I really enjoy a wide variety of books too, but as Will says -- to make a living, you must specialize. You're best off specializing in the most saleable genre(s) you feel real passion for. Writing purely commercially is probably destined to be a chore and not a joy, but writing without any sense of how to market your work is essentially hobby writing. (And I love and celebrate hobby writing, but you have to know it for what it is.)

Personally, I am going to try to write in two genres, YA paranormal and mass-market thriller. They're two things I think I do well and know that I enjoy, and they're both commercially viable. I have other ideas as well (fantasy, scifi), but the reality is, I can only write so fast and have it be of any decent level of quality. Though I am fairly prolific, it looks like my maximum output (at least while employed full time) is going to top out around 2.5 books a year. I simply CANNOT provide publishers with a book every year to two years in more than two genres. If I can't do that, publishers are not going to be interested in investing in me. I want them to invest in me. That means I have to make choices. I think most writers end up in the same situation.

I did, however, say "end up." I think that before you're published, it's wise to try on as many different kinds of work as you can to discover what fits. As recently as two years ago, I had not a thought in the world of trying to write YA. So I'm glad I didn't pick my genre too soon.

To make a long story short (too late): Early on, experiment. Post-publication, specialize.

I read mysteries. I write mysteries.

___________________
Sharon
http://www.saaustin.net

I write romance novels. I write horror short stories. And now I'm trying my hand at a thriller/mystery novel.

Maybe I'm still trying to figure out what I'm good at.

I don't think there's anything wrong with dabbling in other genres than your usual. Who knows? You might find you're good at something else too.

I write SF and Fantasy (heroic and now urban). I'm staying in the same area, but not writing exactly the same thing because I need to learn where my strengths lie. It's what Claudia said. I'm pretty sure once I'm published I will be able to branch out a little within speculative fiction, but to start with I need to put my best foot forwards; I can't do that until I know what it is.

I'd love to get into markets the size of thrillers, romance, or YA, but I don't have the passion for them. I like my genres, so that's where I intend to stay for the moment.

Barbarique said:

Okay, but what if you have Renaissance tastes and REALLY enjoy everything from Fielding to Dumas to Clarence Day? I do, and I'd love to try and write something like each of them (although I'd never live long enough.) I just don't know if that makes me scatterbrained (not good) or adventurous (much better.)

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I'm with you in your reading tastes, but I don't think reading widely equates to writing widely. Each of those authors had their own particular style and scope. I think reading widely is like your literary arsenal-- you can draw from it, and you can join the crowd, but you can't BE the crowd. You will always only ever be YOU, and you have your own particular style. Whether you're trying to pigeonhole yourself in a genre or emulate a particular author, it's the same thing.

I say, write what your heart and mind are drawn to, then worry about the genre.

I also suspect, with the tendency to use pseudonyms for writing outside your "chosen" genre, there are a lot more writers writing across genres than it might at first seem.

I write what I am familiar with and what I enjoy reading. It makes no sense for me to attempt something in a genre I don't enjoy or am not intimately familiar with. I tried that when I first attended college, attempting to write "literature" because I thought that's what the instructors expected of us. It was a disaster.

So I stick with what I know and love.

So if you think that my writing fantasy is willingly pidgeon-holing myself, so be it.

ETA: I don't view it as a straightjacket at all. In fact, I think of it as a nice, comfortable smoking jacket that I put on while having a cigar and a cognac as I worldbuild.

Barbarique said:

Perhaps that's today's publishing paradigm, and if so, I believe we are the worse for it. But t'wasn't always so.

As a person who loves flying in the face of "convention", my favorite exception --and author-- is the novelist Herman Wouk. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Caine Mutiny, he wrote a doorstop novel about a Jewish girl who fantasized over becoming an actress. His agent and publishers were aghast, pointing out that he was a great World War Two writer, and such a book would immediately destroy his career. He wisely ignored them, and Marjorie Morningstar landed him on the cover of Time magazine.

I haven't quite enough hubris that I aspire to his level, but still... one never knows, eh?

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Wouk wasn't strictly a war novelist, no -- but he dealt very heavily with the same themes throughout most of his career. The unique issues surrounding Jewish characters in the time period surrounding the Second World War is a major issue in Caine, Morningstar, Winds of War and War and Remembrance. His (now unbelievably antiquated) opinions about women losing their virginity before marriage play a big part in all of these books also. Show business aspirations play a role in all of those books as well (Madeline's radio career in WoW and WaR, the mutineer's thwarted musical aspirations in Caine.) So even though Wouk wrote some books that were not strictly "war novels," he wrote using themes and tropes that a reader would recognize from work to work. He used much the same prose style as well. He was literary enough not to have to fulfill the conventions of genre, but he knew his strengths and wisely stuck to them.

It's a marketing thing. Readers who liked your first book are going to want another book "just like that one, but different." And if your first book is a romance and your second one is a mystery, some percentage of the readers of the first book will throw the second one at a wall and never read any future book. On the other hand, if you figure out what your core story is -- what it is that really interests you, not necessarily the genre, but the heart of the story (e.g., community or sex or mystery or the absurdity of life or slices of life or childhood or whatever), and you develop a following based on "I like her voice and I'm interested in her core story of ____," then you can, maybe, bend the genre lines a bit.

Dara Joy did this some years ago (before she crashed and burned), but there was a core element (steamy scenes with particularly hunky heroes, before erotic romance really got off the ground), and the same voice, regardless of which genre she was in.

It's also possible that part (a small part, admittedly) of why she crashed and burned had to do with spreading too wide a net, instead of catering to a defined audience.

Books are, in essence, commodities, and they benefit from branding (of the author) much the same as any other product does. It's part of why authors who write across genres do so at their peril, and often take a pen name to do so. Jayne Ann Krentz reportedly almost tanked her career back in the 70s (or 80s?) when she did some futuristic/paranormal books, and had to wait until recently before she could go back to them, writing as Jayne Castle.

Anyway, it's always a matter of what the author wants out of her career. There are two basic options: establish yourself as a brand that readers will be able to identify (e.g., she writes romantic comedy set on islands), to maximize reader identification; or write books in a number of genres (which will then be shelved in different areas of the bookstore, so it's not like someone can say "Oh, I liked that book, so I ought to like the one right next to it by the same author.") and never get any cumulative effect from the prior books.

If you'll be miserable writing in the same genre, then don't do it. But be aware that it will, most likely, seriously reduce your income potential.

JD

JD

It's not choosing abstinence that's antiquated -- it's the idea that any woman who has sex before marriage invariably regrets it horribly, combined with the idea that men are both nigh-universal and correct in their disdain for women who don't remain virgins. That belongs back in the Dark Ages.

And yeah, I had no idea he was still alive! I imagine his career as a novelist has probably ended, though if he can turn something else out at this stage of life, good for him.

But again -- Herman Wouk didn't ignore commercial reality. He worked with it and used it to build a strong career. Jane Austen loved the works of Sir Walter Scott, but she didn't abandon her witty romances to try and write Anglo-Saxon epics. Dickens and Trollope and any other number of great writers from earlier eras were very widely read, and they were dizzingly prolific, but they still mostly hewed to the kind of stories they told best and that their audiences most loved. Even the finest literary writers create an identity, rather than shifting from style to style to show their appreciation; they build their own styles and discover how many different stories they can tell in that voice.

Specialization isn't just bending to the will of commerce, though that is of course a very real will to contend with. It's also a matter of recognizing your limitations and your strengths, of dedicating yourself to your craft and to making yourself the best kind of writer you can be. I think for the majority of people that involves the kind of long, intense effort in improving their skills that pretty much rules out a many-genred career.

Barbarique said:

It is a constant source of amazement to me how so many folks willingly pigeonhole themselves as writers of only a certain genre, i.e. "YA writer", "SF", "Urban Fantasy", "Chick Lit", "Thriller", and so on and so forth. And I wonder, doesn't anyone ever try to write in multiple genres? It reminds me of the way doctors have narrowed their practices these days down to the point of being a "Left Forefinger Knuckle Abrasion" specialist who won't even touch a case of shingles. Now, I realize full well that I'm so old-fashioned as to almost qualify as a Luddite; still, I like to think of myself as simply a writer, not a generic one. My completed novel is a suspense story, my WIP is definitely Women's Fiction, and the one after that will very likely be something else because I don't want to write the same thing over and over.

Am I just a literary schizophrenic, or does anyone else suffer from these unseemly cross-genre urges??

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Going back to this original post, I have to point out that quite a few of us who've been around a couple of decades have, in fact, written in multiple genres. Some of us used pen names to do it, because we recognized or were flatly told by our publishers that it was career suicide to write too many things that were wildly different from each other. Some authors stretched too far, and paid the price; others found a way, as has been noted, to stretch within the genre where their core audience existed.

Most authors who stuck with one "kind" of thing for at least several books in a row were often able after that to stretch a bit or a lot beyond the confines of that genre. Whole sub-genres were born because of writers who did just that.

The reality -- of today's market and just of people -- is that folks want to know what they're getting when they plunk down their hard-earned bucks for a book. So the publisher has to be able to package a book a reader can recognize as a "kind" of story, and if said publisher is investing in the future of a writer, that writer needs to be able to provide the content the publisher can package.

All that said, if you're an aspiring writer, nobody is telling you what to write. Write whatever you want, as long as you want. But I can pretty much guarantee you that unless you produce a ginormous hit that gives you the power to write something radically different the next time around, publishers are going to expect you to deliver at least enough books of the same kind that they can market you effectively and hope for audience growth.

If your audience isn't growing, not many publishers these days will stick with you for long. That's just a fact of the business in these early years of the 21st century.

Well....I don't feel like writing MG or lower. I'm sort of left with YA. I might try to write adult when I grow up, but I'm not even sure.

The truth is, I'm not like a lot of people on here who started reading Dickens for fun as soon as they were through with picture books. I read YA, and basically nothing else. It's what I like. It's a genre I understand, and can relate to, and it's one I think I can write better than anything else I could try.

Within the YA genre, though--which is huge--I've written straight coming-of-age, urban fantasies, science fiction....more coming-of-age....

Barbarique said:

A brand?? Like Gerber or Purina? I think I'd prefer to hang myself.

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*hands her a nice long piece of rope*

Azraelsbane said:

The main problem for me is deciding which genre most of my stuff belongs in. And, yes, I ended a sentence in a preposition. Go ahead and load the cannons.

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Just for you Az.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. -Sir Winston Churchill

I think it's good for writers to stretch their legs a bit so to speak. Not necessarily by writing novels of different genres but just switching up and trying a short story once in a while. Or a novella of a completely different genre than what you usually write. I think it keeps us sharp and who knows what you might come up with?

I write Fantasy / Science Fiction. Okay most of my stuff is so far fantasy but I enjoy the genres. Right now I'll be happy to finish something.

There's an interesting move in the UK market at the moment whereby some literary fiction writers like John Banville are moving into the crime/mystery genre (albeit under a pen name) and others like Jeanette Winterson are moving into YA. Consensus seems to be that this is a sales move - both crime and YA fiction are pretty big in the UK at the moment, so it's a sensible thing to go into if (a) you're interested and (b) able to come up with something.

Personally, I'm writing YA fantasy at the moment, but have tried my hand at suspense, literary and horror short stories and I've got plans to write epic fantasy, science fiction and a good old fashioned crime thriller. If you've got an idea and the interest, then write what you want but don't let what you like writing restrict you in what you like reading. I think you learn far more by reading outside your genre and your comfort zone than you do by sticking within you writing boundaries.

MM

I'm still unclear on why it would be bad or wrong to stay in one genre if that is what one wants to do. It is rather like asking why marry only one man or woman. If the spouse fits...

I like the idea of trying different genres, or at least, styles of stories. I suspect that this is where literary authors actually have an advantage--maybe the only one they possess--because their readers don't expect them to tell the same kind of story forever. They may get annoyed if Novel #3 doesn't please them as much as the first two, but I think they'll look at Novel #4, just to see if the author is, to their way of thinking, back on track. I can think of several writers of literary fiction whom I admire and who have ventured into different kinds of books. I'm sure there's a thread among the books, whether subject matter, treatment, or that none (or all) take place in the modern-day world. But if there is a connection, that's not something that's obvious to the reader who picks up the book for the first time, just as the thematic veins running through Herman Wouk's novels might not be immediately apparent until you've read several of his books and thought about them.

I don't think I'm the type of writer who'd like to be branded, certainly not on any area of my body readily visible to others. An editor I worked with on one of my nonfiction works lamented to me that history (the field in which I was writing) was becoming branded.

I agree

Shadow_Ferret said:

I write what I am familiar with and what I enjoy reading. It makes no sense for me to attempt something in a genre I don't enjoy or am not intimately familiar with. I tried that when I first attended college, attempting to write "literature" because I thought that's what the instructors expected of us. It was a disaster.

So I stick with what I know and love.

So if you think that my writing fantasy is willingly pidgeon-holing myself, so be it.

ETA: I don't view it as a straightjacket at all. In fact, I think of it as a nice, comfortable smoking jacket that I put on while having a cigar and a cognac as I worldbuild.

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So true. Genre is your friend...far, far closer to you than even your favorite enemy. Genre is your guide, your companion, your best guess at what the reader thinks they are reading.

What could be more useful?

Christ. I've just been reading Salinger's Seymour an Introduction...a story in search of a genre.

Actually, having a ginormous hit guarantees that the pressure to write something in the same genre will become equally as ginormous. The publisher invests a lot in an author, building the author's brand (name recognition) to get to that ginormous hit (in most circumstances). They expect an author who hits the NY Times at #50 with one book, to hit at #40 (or some number higher than 50) with the second book, and eventually to be in the top ten. They spend money to help that process along. They expect to reap some of the reward when the investment comes to fruition.

Consider JK Rowling. Harry Potter #1 comes out and does remarkably well, and she hands in her second manuscript, which is a cozy mystery for adults (along the lines of Agatha Christie). Do you really think her publisher would have sent it out into the world with any sort of hype, and if it had done so, that her Harry Potter fans would have bought it in the numbers they did for Harry Potter #2?

What about Neil Gaiman deciding to write, say, a legal thriller with no urban fantasy elements? Or Stephen King writing a romance with no horror elements? Or Nora Roberts writing literary fiction?

The publisher is going to resist it, and the readers are going to resist it.

Which is just another way of saying -- you need to know the market and know your own priorities. If your career plans include a living wage and a new book published every year or two, you're making it infinitely harder on yourself if you skip around genres. If your career plans include writing to entertain yourself and a small, stable number of other readers, that's a perfectly valid career plan, but it comes at a financial cost.

JD