What if your work is not written comfortably within a standard genre? (Mystery, thriller, romance, sci-fi, yada, yada…) Good thing? Bad thing?
I was thinking about popular books like Sideways and The Dogs of Babel––books that don’t quite fit neatly inside traditional genres. There’s are dozens of others that come to mind. Do you think these were harder to get published?
A friend that just signed a two-book deal was advising me on the importance of sending work to specific agents that represent your genre. To which I had to ask myself "what the heck is my genre?"
posted
Sorry rcorporon, can't agree with you. There is tons of material that doesn't fit the standard spaceship/magic definition, that is definitely not mainstream.
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posted
There is a ton of stuff that gets agented by "mainstream" agents which is way outside of the mainstream.
I write science fiction. I also read science fiction.
That's simply the way I think. For me, the logical implications of the logically possible are the framework of a story. It doesn't matter if I've got swords and magic (or a complete lack of either, along with spaceships), I'm still thinking from that perspective.
Now, this may mean that I don't like some stories that are outside of the science fiction genre. More usually, it means that I don't like stories that are supposed to be inside the genre.
If your work has aspects that will clearly mark it as being outside of a given agent's/publisher's/editor's interests, then don't sent it there.
posted
I suppose one could do this, but one also risks "falling between the stools" for being too much of several different things, and being rejected for it by confused editors.
On the other hand, there indeed *are* plenty of works that do this and get away with it. "Lord of the Rings," for example, strikes me as good science fiction in its building up of a complete world...and a good suspense novel (will they or won't they get to Mount Doom and destroy the ring?)...and a meditation of the nature of good and evil, and the folly of despair...and many other things as well.
So write as you think best and worry about what it is when you're finished. (I'm working on a short story right now and can't decide if it's mainstream or a ghost story.)
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