Saturday Night In — Thinking About Genre
I talked about Young Adult fiction in my last blog entry. I was trying to reason out what it actually is after reading “The Hunger Games” for the first time and being surprised by how good it was; how deeply it actually moved into it’s themes and how well written it was.
All I came up with was that it’s all about marketing. I’m sure something similar applies to most genre fiction. But it has me thinking. It’s too early to worry about marketing for my own work (I need a series of edits before anything else) but it does make me question why some things end up being labeled as genre and others don’t. It has me wondering why it is so hard to break out of a genre once you’ve been published in it. It’s something that has held me up for a long time. It’s part of the fear. Sometimes I think as a writer I’m made up of fifty percent fear and fifty percent random thoughts about my cats.
My current work is a fantasy novel but I’ve also written post-apocalyptic, dystopian, thriller, and literary novels, even screen plays. I don’t think that I could ever restrict myself to a single genre.
Now, I suppose none of this should really be a true cocern to someone who is still trying to break in. I should write what I write and now worry about the future. The problem is that you can’t do that when you are trying to make writing your living. The marketing aspects of genre are confusing and honestly don’t seem to follow any true rules. Well, maybe that’s not exactly fair. Maybe it would be more honest to say that the rules for genre and marketing are extremely fluid. But what do you think? Do you worry about being pigeon holed into one genre after selling your first book or do you simply write whatever you feel at the moment. Do the rules for what gets labeled as genre fiction and what doesn’t make sense to you? Did you put off any books because of their label only to find out that you loved them later on? Comment below. Let’s talk about it.
