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Writerly book club – would you be interested
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Hi Holly and everyone, I’d love to join this book club, I’m happy with whatever the timeframe is to be honest. I rather like David’s idea, re the beginnings of a novel, have been trying to crack this for four years, constantly changing and have had lots of advice, some conflicting, so would be great to discuss this all with fellow Jericho Writers. Also Holly, I am hopeless on genres and what fits in each one, not sure any of mine define an already known genre so some books with advice on cross genres would be helpful.
Joss, you book sounds interesting, would love to discuss this one.
Have a great New Year everyone
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This is great to hear, Jane, thank you! I’ll add genre to the list. I’m interested though, how do you currently describe yours? I really didn’t know anything about genre with my debut. I remember calling it “commuter fiction” when what I meant was “commercial”. In reality it was a thriller but I really didn’t know that until quite far down the line!
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Hi Holly
Thanks for your reply, I think broadly my first book would be a love story with elements of mystery (although it is not a conventional romance). The second one is primarily a quest with love and mystery elements. At the moment all I can define them on is bookshelves in a shop which is not exactly what agents are waiting for me to say I guess. As with your experience with your book – I think the question and definition of genre is totally confusing for everyone.
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Hi Jane,
I really dislike this first term for all manner of reasons but working within the confines of existing categories, it sounds like both are either “women’s fiction” or “romantic suspense”. I think agents will see through any clumsiness/vagueness in the way we categorise our own work though, if the story and writing are strong and chime with them. It’s their job to work out how best to pitch it to editors and even if we think we’ve nailed our own genre, they may well think differently anyway!
It’s also confusing that different markets e.g. UK and US have their own genre conventions and it can be hard to know where you sit!
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Jane (and Holly),
Genre exists in three different flavours, which far too many people intermingle, creating the chaos we see in book categorisation. These three distinct flavours of genre are:
- Audience (e.g. YA, commercial, literary, etc; a perilously fluid flavour as publishers try to define new markets to corner.)
- Presentational (e.g. Sci-fi, dystopian, etc., but also police-procedural, etc.)
- Story structure (e.g wonder, ensemble, thriller – see Writing Excuses season 11)
Your book’s overall genre is going to contain one or more of each of those three flavours: Who is your audience? What it the presentational setting and presentational mechanic? What is/are your dominant story-structure element/s?
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That’s an interesting classification I’ve never encountered before. Thanks for the link to that podcast! The way I had it explained to me by someone in the publishing industry (Holly can corrected me if I’m wrong):
– YA, commercial and literary are category and not genre
– Sci-fi, Historical, Contemporary, Fantasy, Romance, Crime, Thriller, etc are genre (of course there are sub-genre i.e. Urban fantasy, Grim Dark, etc… and fiction can be cross-genre too i.e. historical romance, Sci-Fi thriller, etc… which complicates things further)
So far I never encountered POV or structure being part of genre just components of storytelling. Simplified I understand genres as being the shelves you would find in a bookstore but I’ve never seen section about single POV’s, 3 or 4-act structure, etc…
One thing for sure genre and categories are fascinating subjects!
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And that shelf-in-bookstore bit is the whole problem. You can definitely have a “sci-fi crime thriller”. Which belongs on three different shelves. It is all three genres. (And, yes, YA gets its own shelf. At least in some bookstores.)
Hence my – probably in vain – attempt to get a few more people to be even a shade more accurate about which aspect of genre they are referring to when they use the term.
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Hi I’m glad to see this discussion on genre. My book (1st novel, 2nd book) is ready to go out but I have trouble categorising it in a way that agents ‘get’. The agents who have seen it so far, and an editor, have all called it different things. A psychological thriller, a literary mystery, reading group fiction. I’m taking a break over Xmas before getting a new submission pack together. I’ll check out the pod cast too and hope for some clarification. Thanks!
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Hi Trudi, thank goodness I am not alone in this! I would welcome a discussion on our books once you have had your break, look forward to chatting with you.
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Hi Rick
Thanks for your post, and I’ll try to answer within your bullet points which are brilliant and helpful. My audience would be mainly commercial I think, there are elements of thriller/mystery and love story in both of them. They are both hopefully going to interest male and female readers, hopefully a broad audience. Presentation I don’t really understand, I am afraid, but structure wise the first is linear throughout and the second goes back and forth though time as the plot progresses.
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So, Jane, that actually unpacks to:
- audience: primarily commercial
- presentational: tbd
- structure: mystery / thriller / relationship (rearrange as relevant)
For presentational, the questions come in two categories.
The first is the setting. Is it real-world, or something else? Is it historical (really, semi-, alternate)? Is it secondary world? Speculative? Is there a recognisable setting other than generic “could be dropped in any real-world, generic (for your own and your publisher’s culture) town/city” (e.g. wild west)?
The second is presentational mechanics. Easy ones to identify are things like police procedural, or heist. You might think police procedural automatically equates to mystery, but it doesn’t have to. You could easily have a procedural that’s all about humour. Or relationship. Or drama. (That triplet is, indeed, the bais for many budy-cop commedies. Any mystery is merely a secondary hook to get them together to work the other three threads. Buddy cop is, therefore, a sub-genre of the police procedural presentational genre.)
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Hi everyone,
Just to add that if you’re a member of Jericho Writers, there is a great guide to genre here: https://members.jerichowriters.com/content/gpvc-get-agent-bonus-genre/
Holly
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What are the different genre conventions? I find I like ‘psychological suspense’ written by UK writers better than I do from writers from the U.S.
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Genre conventions are more or less defined depending on the different genres and sub-genres. Some are more fluid than others
For example I am not a fantasy expert so I couldn’t tell you the differences or conventions that makes sometimes either epic, grim dark, urban, magical realism, etc…
Romance: tends to be single or dual POV (slips between the 2 MCs), big convention is that the story in romance needs a HEA (Happy Ever After) or at least a HFN (Happy For Now). The meet between the 2 MCs normally needs to happen within a first couple of chapters.
Not a genre but YA category convention: MC is between 13-18 year-old (however having a MC that age doesn’t make a fiction automatically YA, there are plenty of adult fiction with children or teenage MCs), a “YA voice”, deals with typical teenage issues, or coming of age, there is a preference for 1st POV, present tense but that’s not really a convention, more than contemporary trend.
Women’s fiction (really don’t like using that term): deals with broad women’s issues (marriage, friendship, motherhood, etc…) but doesn’t fall into a specific genre.
Psychological thrillers – normally emphasizes the unstable or delusional psychological states of its characters. Plus as they need to be tightly plotted they tend to rely more on structure, usually a 3 or 4-act structure which involves a crisis point at the end of act I, a strong mid-point halfway through the story, climax at the end of act II or III, and denouement in act 3 or 4 (depending on which structure you go for).
I can’t say about the difference between UK and US it might be down to culture and what kind of stories and themes works better or are more popular for each country.
This is far from a complete list but hopefully it can give some ideas.
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Hi Holly, I’m definitely interested, and thanks for instigating this. I love books by writers on writing, and I’m sure discussing them with fellow writers will deepen my/ our reading and understanding of them. I’ve got quite a few ‘writerly books’ in my bookshelf already but always happy to add more. Bimonthly sounds good to me. (I could help out with the wine – in theory – I live in Portugal, and we even have a vineyard 😉 ).
David’s suggestions sound good to me too as a starting point.
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Hi everyone! Just to say, I have created the book club group so please join it here: https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-group-profile?id=29 and I’ll let you know when the first book has been chosen!
Holly
