Whenever\u00a0I’ve\u00a0approached\u00a0anyone and tried to get them interested in my novel, they’ve almost always asked about genre.\u00a0 Literary agents want to see it in query letters, writing competitions demand that you\u00a0specify it\u00a0on your entry form, and readers\u00a0use it as a tool to\u00a0help them choose\u00a0amongst\u00a0the millions of books on offer.<\/p>\n
That makes a certain amount of sense, of course.\u00a0 Whenever you’re trying to get someone to spend time with a book (or a movie, or a TV show, or anything else, really), it’s only fair to give them some idea of what they’re getting into.\u00a0 A reader that\u00a0demands vampires or werewolves should know up front that Peripheral Involvement <\/em>might not fulfill their requirements.<\/p>\n For some books,\u00a0 genre classification seems pretty straightforward.\u00a0 If characters zip around the galaxy at something close to the speed of light,\u00a0I’m guessing\u00a0that you’re\u00a0writing science fiction.\u00a0 The presence of wizards and witches betokens fantasy.\u00a0 The man with the Stetson\u00a0on his head and\u00a0the Colt on his hip is always a relaible indicator of a Western.<\/p>\n I\u00a0never felt like Peripheral Involvement<\/em> had an obvious genre.\u00a0 It’s pretty easy to\u00a0list the things that\u00a0it’s not.\u00a0 It’s decidely not fantasy, romance, horror or science fiction.\u00a0 It’s not at all for teens or young adults.\u00a0 \u00a0It gets a bit trickier, though, when I try to define exactly what it is.\u00a0 A mystery?\u00a0 Well, there is certainly a big element of that in the story, but I’ve always hesitated to bill it as such, or at least primarily as such.\u00a0 Annointing a novel as a “mystery” creates the expectation that everything will be solved in the end, but one of the things that I was trying to explore in this book was the reality that we often have to live without satisfactory explanations, or affirmations that we made the right choices.\u00a0 There is a resolution in the end, but there is no Sherlock Holmes-like character that\u00a0puts all of the pieces together.<\/p>\n How about\u00a0suspense\/thriller?\u00a0 Again, there’s a lot of that here as well:\u00a0 the possibility of a high-reaching conspiracy, life and death consequences… but there’s also a strong focus on the\u00a0main character’s perception of\u00a0himself, and the world around him,\u00a0that I wouldn’t want to minimize by appealing solely to\u00a0readers’ thirst for adrenaline.<\/p>\n That kind of stuff suggests\u00a0literary fiction, but that label always makes me squirm a bit.\u00a0 When I hear\u00a0it, I always\u00a0picture myself in a high-school English class trying to unpack the symbolism in Moby Dick<\/em>, or something along those lines.\u00a0 That’s definitely not\u00a0the kind of thing\u00a0I was going for here.\u00a0 Besides, it seems redundant to call a novel “literary,” doesn’t it?\u00a0 Aren’t they all?<\/p>\n In the end, when pressed, I tell people that Peripheral Involvement<\/em> is a realistic-literary-mystery-suspense-conspiracy-thriller.\u00a0 But\u00a0all I really\u00a0hope is that they\u00a0find it to be\u00a0an engagaing story about an interesting character.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whenever I’ve approached anyone and tried to get them interested in my novel, they’ve almost always asked about genre. Literary agents want to see it in query letters, writing competitions demand that you specify it on your entry form, and readers use it as a tool to help them choose amongst the millions of books on offer. That makes a certain amount of sense, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"yoast_head":"\n