Can we talk genre

[cassiclark]

So I’ve started writing short stories, and the thing abt short stories is they can be very obvious genres, but when we write about the nitty gritty, the dark sides of life genre becomes more difficult to define. I have been defining mine as “political/domestic horror” because they are bizarre like The Lottery. But then I started watching The Premise, which is considered “comedy/drama,” and I realize that genres are currently f*ed. Or maybe tv doesn’t give a shit abt genre. I wouldn’t care, but to find a magazine/publisher one must define oneself so as to be properly categorized with other sellable writers. I would love to be categorized as a sellable writer, but how do I define what I write. I’ve got this in the novel world. But shorts can be so much more esoteric, philosophical. The obvious answer seems to be read every possible place you could get published, but then who has time to write. Genre is a great shorthand for authors and editors/agents to find each other. But if you’d define my story one way and I another. How do we learn each other’s language?Thoughts?

Thank you!!

 

[Leslie]

So I’ve started writing short stories, and the thing abt short stories is they can be very obvious genres, but when we write about the nitty gritty, the dark sides of life genre becomes more difficult to define. I have been defining mine as “political/domestic horror” because they are bizarre like The Lottery. But then I started watching The Premise, which is considered “comedy/drama,” and I realize that genres are currently f*ed. Or maybe tv doesn’t give a shit abt genre. I wouldn’t care, but to find a magazine/publisher one must define oneself so as to be properly categorized with other sellable writers. I would love to be categorized as a sellable writer, but how do I define what I write. I’ve got this in the novel world. But shorts can be so much more esoteric, philosophical. The obvious answer seems to be read every possible place you could get published, but then who has time to write. Genre is a great shorthand for authors and editors/agents to find each other. But if you’d define my story one way and I another. How do we learn each other’s language?Thoughts?

Thank you!!

Hi Cassi
Arg, we feel your pain! @RJ Garside , @Dawn_McClure , and I were discussing genre categories yesterday in our weekly staff meeting. One thing that keeps coming up is how to manage intersections and overlaps between genres. We deal with it here when we classify classes, and define genres for books and CritPartner Matching. It's nearly impossible to define all the genre elements in any one story narrowly. Good stories have elements of several. What the pub pros tell us is that they look for the single genre that drives the plot and characters and then add the rest as "elements of...XX". This comes up most frequently for us with stories around LGBTQ+ and any other genre. For example, we did add to the list of CritPartnerMatch genre choices LGBTQ+ Romance because many of the stories that our LGBTQ+ member authors have are LGBTQ+ Romance. But we have hesitated to add it to any other major genre categories because the numbers are just not there yet.

For us, this is a simple matter of numbers. We can see how many members fall into categories (as can you when you look at the CritPartnerMatch categories), so we try to make the genre and subgenre reflect that. I suspect that is what the publishers are doing as well. If they can sell more stories by further narrowing the genre choices, they will do that. Otherwise, there is no reason to.

So!

I suggest you follow the industry on this. Since you are selling into an existing genre, I would choose the genre for your book that contains the key elements of your plot and GMC, and your characters. And make sure that you are using the same genres as your target publication for sale. This may mean that you slightly change these for each pitch to a different publisher. Then in your pitch you can add the "elements of...xxx" to provide more information.

Good luck!
Leslie