What Are You Writing?

If you have ever talked about our own writing, you have been asked what kind of piece it is. Specifically, they want to know a genre. Comedy, Action, Suspense, Children, Young Adult, Fantasy, Sci Fi, Slice of Life, Memoir, and the list goes on. With so many genres, it seems there is a classification for anything that could be written. And yet, despite the countless options, they very rarely describe your story very well.

One of the first problems with labeling is that no good story fits under one label. Well, some of them do. The Runaway Bunny is pretty much a straight children's story. However, The Runaway Bunny has already been written. If you were to write a story that fit perfectly and neatly into one genre, I can almost guarantee that it will be considered flat, dull, and hackneyed. In fact, I suspect that the only way to write a story that fits perfectly into one genre is to specifically try to (or to have absolutely no idea that any other kind of story exists).

The other problem with labeling is that people tend to misuse labels. Although people generally want to know what genre your writing is, they often confuse your medium with your genre. Just because you're writing poetry doesn't mean it can't be a murder mystery. Just because you're writing "fiction" doesn't mean it has to be a literary novel.

That's the real problem of labels: no one quality defines the whole of a work. I can write something that is a fictional action/suspence novel with scenes of comedy. If I tried to use any one of those words to describe the whole work, it would be extremely inaccurate.

If have learned one lesson about figuring out what to write, it's this: Tell me an interesting story. Let the scholars decide what subtext is in it and let the book stores decide what genre it is. When you write something interesting, other people will gladly do tht work for you.