Hello, writers. Tonight I want to talk about genres, another topic suggested by jabney, who says:
Stretching reality almost to the point of fantasy. Can you have a foot in each camp or should you definitely choose one or the other?
The answer to this question is yes and no.
Realistic fiction with a fantastic element is, GussieFN tells me, called magical realism. Toni Morrison does it. Zora Neale Hurston did it. Alice Walker and Percival Everett and Christopher Paul Curtis do it. They have all written novels which have contemporary or historical settings, mainly realistic, into which they introduce a magical element. Now, you will notice all of these writers have something in common.
That’s right: They’re all really, really good.
You have to be. Because if you defy genre expectations, readers may feel cheated. They will have a WTF moment. You have to have woven your spell strongly enough that they will stay with you during the WTF moment, and afterward, and in the end decide that you did the right thing after all.
Sloppily done, a magical element thrown into a realistic novel comes across as a deus ex machina.
Similarly, if you want to write a murder mystery in which the murder doesn’t get solved, or a romance in which the heroine actually notices that rich, handsome Lord Twittlethwaite seems like a potential abuser, so she marries his valet instead, you’re going to run a risk. You’ll have to do it excellently. And even then, there’ll be muttering. A large proportion of any genre’s fans love the genre’s conventions.
Now as to splitting genres, writing books that in your query letter you find yourself describing as “a children’s story for ages two to 102” or “a historical science fiction romance thriller”, the problem is always going to be…
What shelf is it going to go on?
This may seem like a minor consideration, but believe me it’s not. I’ve got a manuscript sitting in my desk drawer with a stack of rejections saying more or less exactly that. I got an offer to publish the manuscript if I revise it into just one genre, but I never got around to doing that and am not sure the offer still holds.
So basically, yeah, you can write any genre with elements of another genre, but one genre needs to dominate simply so that librarians and bookstore employees know where to shelve it, and readers know whether they want to read it. And you can break the rules for any genre, but you have to do it well, and recognize you’re taking a risk.
For nearly a year now, we’ve been working on the adventures of the Callow Youth, the Stout Companion, and the Jewel of Togwogmagog.
You know the story:
A callow youth (male or female) is the Chosen One who must obtain the sacred jewel of Togwogmagog in order to save the kingdom.
For tonight’s challenge, write the opening of The Jewel of Togwogmagog as if it were one of the following:
- a romance
- a “cozy” mystery
- a police procedural mystery
- a legal thriller
- chick lit
- "literary fiction"
Since it’s an opening, be careful not to info-dump.
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