Lord willing, today.
I'm sorry for the long silence; my comp troubles (and new job as a full-time proofreader) are such that it's taken me awhile to try to figure out what the problem is. Ironically, one of the issues seems to have fixed itself, but I'm a bit wary of that.
I will be attempting to get an article up today, but I've fallen sick. So we'll see how that goes.
Thank you so much for your understanding!
I may not end up getting a regular post in, today. I'm having some browser difficulties.
Thank you for your understanding.
On the bright side, I have a new job starting Monday! Full-time proofreading. I'm looking forward to it.
Many, many fantasy novels take place in a medieval-esque setting not dissimilar from England or the eastern United States in climate. We can probably thank Tolkien and Lewis for that, probably the two most renowned authors of fantasy.
Most fantasy writers draw on those men's works for inspiration, including me. Some draw on them too much, producing a story that's pretty much Narnia or Middle Earth by another name. Not to bash Eragon, but I know someone who could tell who the author had read by how he wrote the book.
But as fantasy has developed as a genre, writers have gotten more creative with it. The Tolkienesque aspects like the settings and usage of alcoholic beverages are still common, but it's not hard to find different environments, different races, different times, different themes… Fantasy has come to be quite diverse in its content, to the point that things that could be considered fantasy actually fall into other genres.
The blurred line falls on what some people define as fantasy: fiction depicting events that cannot occur in real life. Most people call that blanket speculative fiction (spec fic), and it applies to the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres.
Under the speculative fiction umbrella, the best ways to try to separate the genres comes by identifying certain elements.
Most things have two genres: a general category and a more specific genre. Most often, fantasy, sci-fi, and horror end up being primary genres, but it depends on the audience.
When the spec fic genre is arguable—Shanna Swendson's Enchanted, Inc. books come to mind as romance/chick lit/fantasy combos—don't sweat it. Pick one you like; the line's blurred, anyway.
And honestly, that's what genre's all about: categorizing your story.
Genres are simply conventional categories for explaining what something is, usually writing, but they can also apply to rhetoric. Things within the same genre share certain traits, and some genres are more flexible than others.
For example, a work cannot be a romance without a romantic relationship developing between characters. It cannot be a mystery if there is no plot-defining conundrum that must be solved. It cannot be nonfiction if the author made it up (or so we hope).
But to be called a science fiction, all a work needs is to have even a slight bit of creativity with time and/or science beyond where either element is in the present day. That can be a future society, a spacefaring setting, or a modern-day story with just a few more gadgets than we actually have now. What are now generally called "alternate histories" have been considered at times to actually be science fiction.
And speaking of blurred lines, science fiction and fantasy have the closest, since science fiction really is a subset of fantasy. Most people have their own nuances of definition. A good simple one is to call it a fantasy if it's magic and sci-fi if it's science, but even then you can find books that bounce between the lines. (The Deathgate Cycle, for example, could be thought of as either, though it's really more… er… both.)
Continuing the description of genres, the novel and short story are each a genre, too, that people can often easily identify. The other fiction genres due to length—microfiction, flash fiction, novelette, novella—have different definitions depending on who you ask. Generally speaking, though, anything too short to be a short story is "microfiction" or "flash fiction", while anything too long for a short story but to short for a novel is a "novelette". (This is an oversimplification.)
The age groupings for novels likewise constitute genres. Children's, YA, and adult fiction all have their distinguishing characteristics that make them the genres they are.
Can something meld genre lines? Certainly. But genres are like grammar: you have to know the rules before you can legitimately break them.
Genre doesn't matter, you may think as you work on your novel or short story or whatever. You plan to worry about that after you're done writing it.
Problem: how can you develop your book to the maximum effectiveness if you don't know what it is?
A post by the agent Kristin Nelson on her Pubrants blog comes to mind. In her rant, "I've Got A Memoir But It Could Be Published As A Novel" [sic], she laments writers treating memoirs and novels as if they can be easily interchanged. Her point: they can't.
In the same way, you can't write a mystery novel and decide at the end that it could be equally marketed as a romance novel. Is it a mystery or a romance? Maybe it's both—which one stands out as the primary genre? If it ever makes it to the store, it'll have to be shelved somewhere.
And let's say you wait till the first draft's done to decide you want it to be a paranormal romance. Problem: you didn't add anything romantic until halfway in, so now you have to go back and make sure it's a romance. And fix all those references to your tall, dark, and handsome hero from before you decided to make him a werewolf. Do you really want to risk the embarrassment and problems from missing such basic details as those?
Not knowing your genre while you're writing a work can also handicap you. You may know precisely what you want to accomplish with the book, you may know the tone, the narrator, the plot… But you can't figure out what genre it is.
You therefore worry that maybe you're not writing it the best way that it can be written, since something's substantially different from what you think of when you consider the genre you know it'll be shelved in. Is that difference a problem or a strength?
That's where some knowledge of or willingness to research literary genres can help. Perhaps the closest you can come to a standard genre in defining your work is "dark-toned fantasy." If you know enough about literary genres to know that it also happens to be in the female gothic tradition (like Northanger Abbey and Jane Eyre), your comfort with your story will likely increase.
I know it did for me.
For the month of January, Cuppa Caff's theme will be something that's given me quite a bit of fodder to chew on, personally: genres.
Writers always need to know what genre a certain piece of their fiction is. It may be a mix, but there's surely one (or two) can be the primary pegs in any work. I'll be defining the genres, like romance and mystery, with some input as to what formulas or components these genres tend to contain.
Now, genre definitions do vary according to the definer—most noticeably with the sci-fi and fantasy genres—so bear that in mind when reading. I'll also be covering some literary genres that might help some of us figure out what they're writing.
Enjoy!
Blog content and skin © Misti Wolanski. Unauthorized use prohibited.
