"What's My (Primary) Genre?"
"SFF? Romance? How do I know??"
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is an advice column for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response!
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Dear Kate,
I’m working on a speculative novel and recently the characters have started running off with a mind of their own. How dare! There’s a central relationship that seems increasingly important to the book the more I write. Is this still a speculative/SFF novel? Is it a romance? Maybe you can’t answer this, but how explicit can I go if I want to be traditionally published someday? Are the rules different if I self-publish instead? I know it’s too early to submit to agents, but I’m trying to learn about the process in advance and start putting together a list. I don’t know whether to focus on agents who do speculative fiction, romance agents, or am I looking for agents who rep er*tica? It’s set in the real world with a twist, so it’s not quite science fiction, either.
- How Hot is Too Hot?
Dear Too Hot,
I have a few questions about genre in my queue and I was going to answer them all at once in one Big Genre Post, but it’s the summer and I’m writing to you all while enveloped in a layer of early morning marine fog off the coast of central California, and many people are traveling or kid wrangling or juggling summer schedules, so I decided to do what I always advise my writing and editing clients to do and take a smaller bite instead of thinking I have to chomp down on the whole thing at once. So! One genre question for today, and more to follow. :-) (And if you have a question about genre or about anything else related to publishing or craft, ask away! I’d love to hear from you.)
Those pesky characters always seem to have a mind of their own, don’t they?! This is, alas, what writing is, when all our best laid plans go awry because we discover the story by writing the story, and everything about the book is purely hypothetical until we write it down. My first suggestion is to be patient and see where this goes for you! It sounds like you’re in the thick of the first draft and feeling your way through the narrative. It’s good to have an eye on the end goals (agent, publication, etc.), but sometimes that can leave writers trying to stuff a story into a too-small suitcase just to make it fit what we thought the thing was going to be. Think about genre, yes. AND be open to wherever this exciting draft may go.
Genre is about where the book fits on the shelf and how it does (or doesn’t) conform to certain beats and expectations that accompany each category. For more on genre and categorization, see my post about writing in multiple genres:
Many, many books straddle or encompass more than one genre. “Romantasy” (romantic fantasy) is huge right now, for example. Books can be mysteries set in outer space, historical thrillers, romantic westerns—you name it. What you’re writing sounds like a speculative romance, a speculative novel with romantic elements, or a straight up speculative novel (where the romance doesn’t need to be mentioned when categorizing the genre because it’s still first and foremost spec fic). It all comes down to the balance of these genre elements and whether you’d shelve the book in the romance section or under speculative/SFF.
What I can almost guarantee sight unseen is that you’re not writing an er*tic novel.1 (More on that below.)
Romance is a specific genre. Romance readers have set expectations for what a romance novel will do when they pick up a book. (If you’re new here, I’ve written romance under the pen name Rebecca Brooks and have an agent and publisher just for my romance novels, so this is a world I know well.) A romance is about a central romantic relationship (usually a couple) and ends in a happily ever after (HEA) where the couple is shown to be securely together by the end. There are unlimited permutations of what this can look like, but the HEA is sacrosanct. Someone inevitably comes along and claims they’re writing a romance without an HEA and loves to debate this point, but for dedicated romance readers, a novel about a central couple in which they break up or one character dies by the end is a novel with romantic elements, or a romantic novel, but it’s not a romance.
For you, Too Hot, the question of whether you’re writing a romance novel or a spec novel as your primary genre comes down to the role of the romance in the narrative and whether it fits the expectations of genre romance. Is the story COMPLETELY focused on your central couple, tracing an arc in which there’s interest between them, followed by a central external and internal conflict pulling them apart, and then equal external and internal forces that bring them back together again for their HEA? Does it read like the other romance novels in your market, thus ensuring that you’ll reach the right readers for your work?
The distinction I’m trying to make here is that the presence of romance isn’t enough to make something a romance. Including open-door s*x scenes rather than fading to black doesn’t change this.
If you immerse yourself in almost any form of narrative-based media, chances are that you’ll find a romance as some part of the plot. Action adventure movie where things go boom? I bet there’s a girl the beefed up hero is fighting for. Angsty series about life, loss, and coming of age? Someone’s getting their first kiss. It’s practically a cliché to open every realist drama on TV with an explicit s*x scene so we know things are going to be “edgy” and “interesting.” These aren’t romances, though, and they’re not er*tica. Romance is a big part of many people’s lives, and romantic elements are a big part of many narratives, serving to establish character, build motivation, and add emotional depth, tension, catharsis, and resolution. Romance isn’t a requirement for storytelling (or in life). But if you look more closely, I think you’ll start to notice just how prevalent it is even (especially?) in books, shows, and movies that aren’t romances at all.
So, are you writing a romance? I suspect probably not. But read some speculative romances and see if that’s a genre that excites you and is something you want your own book to be. Read speculative novels that aren’t specifically categorized as romances and see if that feels like a better fit instead. There’s no right or wrong answer to what your book is going to be, and you’re asking the right questions to make sure that what you’re writing is meeting what agents and future readers are going to expect when they pick up your book.
As for er*t*ca, the answer is the same: this is its own distinct genre with its own expectations. Look for romance publishers who specifically publish er*tica in order to get a sense of the genre and how it differs from other forms of fiction that have explicit s*x in them. Er*tica and er*otic romance aren’t even the same genre—that’s how big all these distinctions are! It’s not the presence of s*x that makes a novel er*tica, or an er*tic romance—it’s the role and function of s*x in the plot and character arc, and the way the novel favors s*xual content as the spine of the narrative over other forms of narrative work.
There are SO MANY mainstream novels with explicit content and/or deeply s*xual undertones (or overtones) that aren’t categorized as romance or er*tica at all. Call Me By Your Name, The English Patient, Sula, Vladimir, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, All Night Pharmacy, Atonement, Prodigal Summer, The Corrections, Amy and Isabelle, The Shards, My Dark Vanessa, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida — I’m scanning my ereader and came up with this list in two seconds. You’ll have your own list and your own opinions. The point is that sxual content is commonplace in literature and your book is not going to be too hot for publishers or readers to handle. The answer to how much is too much is about what works in your own writing, in your own novel, and how it’s earned its place as essential to the story you’re telling. You won’t necessarily know the answer to that until you finish writing.
So keep reading, keep writing, and keep going!
- Kate
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