Picking Your Genre
I’ve been giving some thought to genre since I started work on a new novel in February. And as I looked at Elaura Niles’ Some Writers Deserve to Starve (Writer’s Digest Books, 2005), I wondered what genre some of my favorite novels are in, at least in the minds of booksellers, librarians and reviewers. I’ve been surprised, at times, where I find certain authors and books in the library or bookstore.
Niles’ Truth #5 is: “A Rose by Any Other Name…Doesn’t Sell.” Niles doesn’t recommend getting too caught up in this, and certainly not focusing on genre to the point of letting it dictate your story. Better to dip into tropes from multiple genres and remain true to the story than force it into the structure of a particular genre.
Still, it’s useful to know your genre(s)–crossover is okay, as long as you can pinpoint which is the genre that is the most dominant in your manuscript.
I googled one of my favorite novels, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (HarperCollins), to see what genre people categorized it in. I consider it literary fiction, but found these genres listed in just the first few search pages: post-colonial fiction, domestic fiction, historical fiction, epic, political allegory, coming of age, contemporary fiction, modern fiction and general fiction.
A book on my “read soon” list, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (HarperCollins), came up as fantasy, horror, thriller, urban fantasy, science fiction and mystery.
Figuring out genre will be a task, I think, for the query preparation process, but I will keep asking myself the genre question as I continue writing. It may make all the difference when it comes to pitching my work to agents. And a good book, pitched incorrectly, won’t be published. So it will behoove me to get this right.