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I recently did a talk at Havant writers about mixing genres together successfully: have decided to share my summarised wisdom (LOL) with you in a series of blog posts over the next three Tuesdays. Starting with...
All of us need to ask a simple question about whatever piece we happen to be writing. Who is this for? The answer might be that it's for our pleasure alone, or to be read to a small number of people - maybe a writers' group - to put on the internet for free, to self publish, to go to an indie publisher, to go to an agent with the hope of finding a large publisher. (I see that as a spectrum, not a ladder of increasing merit!) As you move across the spectrum, the author has less control over the finished product and needs to take more account of what the end user - the reader - wants.
That's particularly applicable when it comes to genre. So the next, blooming obvious, question is What genre/sub-genre does this come into and does it have a secondary genre as well? And what will the reader expectations be for those genres?
It's worth considering the nature of genre conventions at this point. Some authors get a bit riled with them, because they constrict creativity and they mean writing to formula. The real world isn't divided into neat categories and, in real life romances don't always have happy endings and the murderer isn't always caught and brought to justice, so the romance and mystery genres provide an unrealistic version of life. While I can understand these points, I can only see the flipside, namely...
Why shouldn't readers be able to escape from real life into a book where the world is made right, and where both happy ever afters and catching the baddie are de rigeur? Surely that escapism is one of the reasons the romance and mystery genres are so popular? Also, when I go to buy a tin of Heinz baked beans, that's what I expect to find in the tin, not spaghetti hoops. In the same way, by looking for genre tags I can - as a reader - ensure that I'm getting the product I want. I expect authors to play fair with me by making sure their product fulfils the tagging. If I picked up a Western and it was set entirely in Hartlepool I'd be less than happy!
All of us need to ask a simple question about whatever piece we happen to be writing. Who is this for? The answer might be that it's for our pleasure alone, or to be read to a small number of people - maybe a writers' group - to put on the internet for free, to self publish, to go to an indie publisher, to go to an agent with the hope of finding a large publisher. (I see that as a spectrum, not a ladder of increasing merit!) As you move across the spectrum, the author has less control over the finished product and needs to take more account of what the end user - the reader - wants.
That's particularly applicable when it comes to genre. So the next, blooming obvious, question is What genre/sub-genre does this come into and does it have a secondary genre as well? And what will the reader expectations be for those genres?
It's worth considering the nature of genre conventions at this point. Some authors get a bit riled with them, because they constrict creativity and they mean writing to formula. The real world isn't divided into neat categories and, in real life romances don't always have happy endings and the murderer isn't always caught and brought to justice, so the romance and mystery genres provide an unrealistic version of life. While I can understand these points, I can only see the flipside, namely...
Why shouldn't readers be able to escape from real life into a book where the world is made right, and where both happy ever afters and catching the baddie are de rigeur? Surely that escapism is one of the reasons the romance and mystery genres are so popular? Also, when I go to buy a tin of Heinz baked beans, that's what I expect to find in the tin, not spaghetti hoops. In the same way, by looking for genre tags I can - as a reader - ensure that I'm getting the product I want. I expect authors to play fair with me by making sure their product fulfils the tagging. If I picked up a Western and it was set entirely in Hartlepool I'd be less than happy!
