Choosing Which Genre You Write: Locating Your Interest and Making It Your Own

Being a writer doesn’t mean you have to write in one genre alone, but it does mean you will naturally prefer to write in one over another.

One way to find your preferred genre and become better at it is to look at the kinds of books you enjoy reading the most. Do you like historical fiction, or sci-fi, or fantasy? Which one do you most often find yourself reading?

For me, my first love was historical fiction set in any one of three particular American wars, so my first novel was about a girl in one of those time periods.

What Genre Are You Most Interested In?

No, I actually don’t mean which genre you read the most, although I suppose that’s an acceptable answer. I mean which genre do you want to read more of, or you spend your time picturing yourself writing the next bestseller in? (Every writer has dreams of that. I’m not a mind reader.)

Okay, now grab a notebook or open a note taking app and find a book you’ve read in that genre. Skim the book if you need a memory jog and write down the things that fascinated you. Think about things you wish had been different in the plot or characters you admire. Set the notebook aside. If you like, you can use it later when brainstorming your novel.

What Interests or Interested You About that Genre?

For me, historical fiction is interesting because of the personal stories. It makes me think about the world and people around me and gives me a thought connection to that time period which otherwise might have gone ignored and forgotten (by me).

Science fiction is interesting to me because of the technologies it opens up to the writer. What if the DeLorian existed? What about spaceships and teleporter thingies? How would these things effect the modern world?

Mysteries are interesting because they stretch my imagination and reasoning. How did the writer get that unknown suitcase to end up in the locked room? How would I, as the writer, have gotten that suitcase into the room?

Once I have the answers to these questions, or I’m simply asking these questions, I can turn them into a novel in that genre by brainstorming about what I can write that will answer those questions, or how I can answer the questions differently than the author who inspired me did.

How Can You Make It Your Own?

The environment a character lives in will have an important effect on their jobs, their friends, their hobbies, and even their meals. That’s how things work in reality. Watching these effects pulls me to think about what history would be like if the world was different. Call it alternate history, if you will.

I like to combine the contemporary (modern day) world with the technology of sci-fi and my love for writing law enforcement. I also toss in historical fiction because with time travel devices available, why not?

As long as you’re picking one main genre and add parts of the others to complement that genre, nobody can say your story world is wrong. They can just tell you what they had trouble understanding upon their “arrival” in your “country” and trust you to explain.

Brooke Johnson, out.