I’ve always preferred to color outside the lines. No matter how awesome the box, I’m not good at staying inside it. I can’t march to anyone else’s drum. (Can’t really march at all, but anyway.) Perhaps it’s no surprise I’m awful at cramming my writing into a genre.
As a reader, I find genre highly useful. I know what I’m getting when I grab a space opera, a military SF, a cozy mystery, a Big Fat Fantasy. I want some surprises, of course, but I also want to know what I’m getting into. That what I’m picking up is the sort of book I’m going to enjoy.
That’s as a reader. As a writer…I have a serious genre-problem. I can’t help it—I like to cross lines. At the Alamo, I’d have been doomed for certain.
Recently I received a critique on the first chapter of His Faithful Squire, which is what got me thinking of this. The main points of the critique were that HFS didn’t sound like space opera. Why was it important this story be science fiction? I needed to emphasize the setting. Bring in the danger, the conflict. Don’t mention herbs, that makes it sound like fantasy.
I’ll be working on the setting because I know I can always use some work on my description. The rest of the critique, though, simply tells me I’m not in the box labeled “space opera.” Heck, I knew that! I called it space opera because I had to call it something. It has spaceships but not hard science…space opera, I decided. Close enough.
The problem is that when you tell someone a book is space opera, they have expectations. Where’s the grand sweeping epic? Not in this book, sorry. The conflict is on the first page, but the critiquer overlooked it, trying to find what made the story space opera. Oops.
Care to guess why I’m self-publishing? Hint: without an identifiable genre, I’m a marketing nightmare.
His Faithful Squire doesn’t need to be science fiction. I could take out the spaceships and have the same plot. I could make the traveling show earth-bound, could set the formal ball they crash in some mansion in Boston. I could take out all the fun stuff and make the book a literary fiction angst-fest if I wanted. (Note: am not calling all literary fiction an angst-fest. That’s just what this book would be without the fun.) Literary fiction, however, is not what I write.
Here’s what His Faithful Squire is: it’s a novel about Rafe Ballard. He’s twenty-two and he’s been exploited most of his life, forced to be whatever his current caretaker expected of him. Now he’s free to be himself (more than free—Taro insists), but he doesn’t know who he is. He’s trying to figure that out. In the shadow of his beloved and massively competent (not to mention impulsive and forceful) Taro, that’s not an easy thing to do.
Explosions happen. Karaoke happens. Rafe and Taro take on the galaxy and each other. Some lives are changed and some ended. A great read is (I hope) enjoyed, and perhaps some pondering of life’s struggles ensues.
It’s a story. One I hope will find and delight readers no matter what label is used.