I Hate Genres
You may have noticed a lack of blogging in the past few months.
I’ve run out of thoughts. There’s nothing left. Head empty.
No, no, jokes, of course. The real reason is between working on marketing for THEN CAME THE THUNDER, as well as continuing to edit THREE WILLOWS BOOK 2, I just haven’t had time. My fingers can only take so much.
But speaking of marketing, I wanted to take some time and vent. Learning about the background of running ads and selecting categories on Amazon has been super illuminating and super frustrating at the same time. Illuminating, because seeing how unique and detailed some of these keywords can get is actually really amazing. For example, one of the keyword phrases for THUNDER is “forced proximity friendship.” Which, yes, is a thing that happens in the book, and it never occurred to me that people might go looking for stories containing that kind of plot element specifically. That’s amazing. The line between legit book sales and AO3 tags is literally nonexistent.
Frustrating because after all the market research, I still feel like my book doesn’t fit into a clear genre. Historical fiction works, but it feels so broad. And I feel like one of the key selling points for historical fiction is period accuracy, and while I did do a heck of a lot of research on frontier life in 1862, there’s also some fantasy elements, which I’m not sure the typical Historical Fiction reader would necessarily want.
I’m also looking ahead at the other ideas I’ve got in the hopper after the THREE WILLOWS trilogy is complete, and they are likewise, kind of genre mashups. I’m so eager to write them, but dreading describing them. Gaaaaaah.
I know for sure I’m not alone in this, and I’m trying to find a way to make things sit comfortably in my head. There are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed. You wouldn’t find magical spells in a legal thriller, for instance. (UNLESS YOU DID!!) I think a ton of it, in the end, boils down to simple personal preference. I used to be a hardcore almost exclusive fantasy reader. It would be the shelf I’d go to, it was what I was into, and I really didn’t consider other genres at all. I want to say GONE GIRL was the first time I actively picked up a book outside the fantasy genre because I happened to read the blurb and felt intrigued. And at the time, it felt like a risk! Imagine that! Dangerous book reading! I’m a lot older now, and my shelves are much more diverse. There’s still plenty of fantasy, but there’s some classic sci-fi on there too, as well as contemporaries, historical mysteries, and my quarantine purchased box of vintage romance paperbacks. I think reading more widely has only helped me develop as a writer.
But I can also blame reading more widely for making me want to incorporate elements of everything into what I write. Not to mention putting mystery solving in pretty much everything.
I don’t have a solution. But I found this article to be a source of comfort and a different way to look at things. In the words of the Mary Poppins musical, “anything can happen, if you let it,” but by opening your book, a reader has offered their trust to you, the author.
Casey McQuiston: For me, it’s about finding the sweet spot between suspension of disbelief and punching up. A lot of romance stories take place in settings or under conditions that we may want to challenge in the real world—monarchies, for example—and I like committing to the bit while also subverting the tropes that come with it and inviting the reader to examine them with me.
Does every romance novel need to have a happy ending?
Jasmine Guillory: Not every love story does, but every book called a romance does. When readers are specifically looking for a romance, they want a book with a happy ending.
Helen Hoang: When readers trust that everything is going to be O.K. in the end, they open their hearts to experience a wider range of emotion, because they’re not protecting themselves from pain. This is something special to the genre.
Onjuli Datta: The most important thing is to leave your characters in a place where the reader can say goodbye to them, even if they don’t want to.
