Writing in Multiple Genres or Specializing
By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)
One of the empowering, amazing parts of being an independent author is we get to choose. That ability to choose and experiment is one of the things that drew me to self-publishing rather than trying to work with a traditional publisher.
A lot of the choices we make won’t have a right and a wrong. Instead, they’ll have a right for me and a wrong for me. What’s important is that we understand our options and select the one that suits us.
So today I’m going to cover one of the choices we have—whether to focus on writing in a single genre or whether to write across multiple genres.
I hope you’ll join me over at Fiction University for my regular monthly guest post–Writing in Multiple Genres or Specializing.
Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Check out my Busy Writer’s Guides such as Description, Deep Point of View, or Internal Dialogue.
Image Credit: Michal Zacharzewski/www.freeimages.com
Aug 25, 2016 @ 12:13:38
Hi Marcy,
My comment is a wee bit a side issue: I contend that genres are nothing more than key words we use to describe a book AFTER it’s written–or should be in this internet world. I never set out to write a novel in X genre. I write the story, letting plot and characters take me where they will.
That said, I suppose my books after the fact can be classified as mysteries, thrillers, or sci-fi, but most are combinations, which is a propos to your topic. We humans love taxonomies, but I’d much rather readers peruse my book’s blurb and “peek inside” to see if they think they might like the story than say, “Oh, Moore has another mystery.” Bottom line: genres are claustrophobic for writers!
r/Steve