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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

When genres collide!

12:18 / 15.11.06

Whilst recovering some old text files from something akin to an early word processer/computer I managed to find an early 'second draft' of a novel that I'd tried to write more than ten years ago. Apart from that little glow of nostalgia that was fanned by its discovery, there was also a part of me that felt that the story deserved another shot - that perhaps fate had decreed its discovery at this point in time so that I might redraft it with more experience and hopefully a better style. I flicked through some of it quickly - it starts well, in fact very well, and has a core idea somewhere in there - the thing is, it mixies several genres and got me thinking, how many genres is too many? What genres work well together, and which ones have you witnessed and groaned at their union? How many is too many?

14:32 / 15.11.06

It has a lot to do with which specific genres you're mixing. Romance, humor and adventure can blend with almost any other genre. Mystery can be combined with most, but detective stories often suffer if they're mixed with an otherworldly genre (readers can get annoyed if the key to solving the mystery is having some knowledge that doesn't exist in reality).

Science fiction and epic fantasy might be the toughest to combine with each other. I know Piers Anthony and others have experimented with doing so, but I've never read one that satisfied me.

Of course, it all depends on the skill of the writer. Some can blend genres easilly, almost naturally, while others make you feel like each chapter was written by a different writer. So, if you're feeling confident, get down with your sci-fi/pirate/romance/mystery story.

21:59 / 15.11.06

Which genres are present in the draft already?

I think you could probably mix most genres together, but if you're using more than 2 or 3 you're probably risking losing something inamongst the mish-mash of genre conventions.

But again, that's assuming that you want it to be subtle. Quentin Tarantino throws as many genres and subgenres into a film as he possibly can, and it works because it's deliberately post-modern, ironic and self-aware.

04:34 / 16.11.06

So far there are three, maybe four 'sections' to the piece - future sci-fi, present day cop thriller, out of time religious/politico thriller, otherworldly theological err thingy (not sure really) - the basic idea is that an event in the future affects the past which in turn impacts the present - and a team of investigative detectives from (for lack of a better word) heaven or the afterlife, or whatever, are sent to try and work out why an (again for lack of a better word) angel was murdered. There are four worlds within the story, running at the same time - the future, the present, the out of real time 'heaven' and the implication of something above that. I agree that murder mysteries rarely work unless grounded in the real world, as most readers want to feel as smart as if not smarter than the characters, and there is a certain amount of thrill in trying to piece the puzzle together.

07:10 / 17.11.06

If you actually want to sell it, don't mix genres at all. They hates that, those publishing types.

Learned from bitter experience.

09:38 / 17.11.06

thank you! Yeah, just from the few answers here, it seems to be partly what the audience want and partly what the marketers want to try and sell them!

03:49 / 21.11.06

well, i think it sounds interesting.

and sax - were you being sarky? I haven't read yours (mea culpa), but isn't yourn a bit of a genre blend?

I personally don't think you can have too many genres, as long as it hangs together. If you're worried about the genre thing, try explaining an artefact from one genre in another and see how that works (writing this off the top of my head, but it feels like a decent enough idea...).

Like, they're not vampires, you don't call them vampires, but they've got a kind of blood-borne infection that creates all the symptoms that you'd associate with vampirism.

Tho' I'm not sure how you'll work that with angels and heaven.

maybe just ignore me.

But I like the blendy blend. China Mieville does it pretty well, in books like The Scar (pirates and vampires and quantum mechanics! woo!).

I wrote a kind of pseudomanifesto about genre blending once.

22:15 / 21.11.06

It seems like the big, blocky genre elements ("A spaceship crash-lands near a group of fantasy adventurers stalking Vampires? Prepare for hijinks!") are hard to combine without becoming comedic, intentional or otherwise. I think things are most mixable where a setting or items from one genre are combined with themes associated with another. A time-travelling romance with a hint of steampunk, for example. Or a politics-driven fantasy setting with a good dose of horror. Cyberpunk essentially started as computer-fetishist sci-fi mixed with corporate fear and bleak distopian future. It all SOUNDS clunky when you put it like that but in practice, the writing seems to function in this organic whole.

I love well-done hybrid genres. I love it when they try to see if something believable can be made by mucking around with multiple storytypes. I've always wanted a comprehensive list of sub-genres, in fact. I know. It's all subjective and there's been raging debates on how to split them for years and many books aren't easy to categorize but I'm the kind of person who feels this creeping dread when I read about a genre-blend I haven't heard before.

"Writer A is a master of X-punk*, deftly weaving fresh ideas into a novel that threatens to become one of the most provocative examples of X-punk this decade."

If I have not heard of X-punk, this will send me into a panic. When did this movement start? Is it significant? Was it really worth a category of its own? Have I been missing something I'd really enjoy for years?! Drives me batty. (Anyone know of a good resource on this, let me know. All I've found are the increasingly useless sci-fi, western, fantasy, horror, romance, etc...lables)

*Steampunk, Splatterpunk, cyberpunk...people just love the punk suffix.

11:51 / 27.11.06

and sax - were you being sarky?

Unfortunately, no. Like Sylvia, I love genre-blenders, but according to Those Who Know the industry hates them, because they don't know how to market them or who to.

23:15 / 04.12.06

"Unfortunately, no. Like Sylvia, I love genre-blenders, but according to Those Who Know the industry hates them, because they don't know how to market them or who to."

Kind of sad, really. I mean, what if the marketing mix up resulted in my Harlequin-romance-loving grandmother reading your mix? She might actually like it and start to read something differnt. But the marketers don't want to take that chance.

I don't write books, I just read them. But I love reading books that have tons of ideas crammed in them, as long as the ideas work together fluently and each is necessary to the story. If mixing genres means more ideas, then great!