Genre Bending or Breaking?

Walk into any bookstore and you'll find all of the latest books sorted into these perfect little categories. Fiction, Non-Fiction, Biography, Fantasy, Romance are all nicely printed in bold letters on placards scattered about the store. More and more frequently I have been seeing books that merge genres or in some cases encompass elements of so many that I can't quite place where they actually belong.

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Break the Marketing Pocket until you’re selling – Genres

Each of these has a specific connotation when attached to a book. When you tell others that you’re a writer, their first question is almost always “What do you write?” Our answer usually fills in with a label similar to those above. However, modern writing has started to defy the old classification model.

Read the rest at my blog: http://swordsvspens.blogspot.com/2011/09/break-marketing-pocket-until-youre.html

The unknown substance

As it is not popular, more and more writers go without boundaries. Here at least. I’ve come across fellow craftsmen, who find it insulting if someone brings up that they would do better if they would add similar ingredients to their pot of plot which would give some familiarities to search them by. It “castrates” their creativity, they say, and write on genre-less books, not realizing that the editors will still try to fit it in some shelf next to genre books. One even compared it with paint-by-number picture.

Indeed, when writing inside genre, you are creating work by certain standards so the reader can get exactly what they wanted from the book. I would be very happy if it was indeed like painting by numbers, but I fear it’s more like Jan van Eyck oil painting, including grinding your own paints.

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Genre-Bending: When categories just don't fit

For this month's Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour, we're talking about genre and what happens when writers ignore the boundaries of bookstore categories.  Actually, I also want to talk about my experience as a reader and how genre can both inform and limit me in my search for something new and shiny to read. (Continue reading "Genre-Bending. . . )

Isn't One Genre Per Story Enough?

So what’s the deal with cross-genre fiction? Isn’t enough that we have a dozen genres to write, read or watch on TV?

Continue reading here: D.M.Bonanno.