I know a lot of those who use this site are either fantasy or literary fiction, but I wondered if there were any of you struggling to pin your book(s) down to just one catagory. I know I have to before submission, but I find the catagories limiting. It's not just a romance or women's fiction and it certainly isn't chick lit. (I have nothing against chick lit and have written one of those too, but this one just isn't.) I think mainstream is the best way to describe it and offers it to the full audience it caters for, but that's not really a catagory. I noticed someone earlier call their book 'travel fiction'. I could tick that box too, but it's not best described that way. When I do describe it, I call it 'The story of a man with both physical and mental ilness who refused to go to the doctor.' The series of five books covers every area of his strange life. How do I pigeonhole that? - saga?
It's a hard one that Victoria. I guess mine would be a thriller but possibly not hard boiled.
A novelist, Sophie Hannah, saw my first draft and suggested the challenge in placing it later might be genre. She suggested it was crime, but a very unsual example and that I should try agents handling crime fiction, which I did, no joy, but this was a few years back, I've since done total rewrites. It isn't a procedural, and just because the main protagonist is a police officer doesn't mean it conforms to the characteristics of the genre. It could just as accurately be called a ghost story, so I will pitch it as general fiction, non-genre. Most of my favourite reads are non-genre.
Sadly, if I could think of a broad genre, I wouldn't have asked, but thanks Louise.
Jean-Marc, I think you and I have just started our own sub-genre, because my characters go off on a round the world journey having not seen each other for eight years and she gradually learns about his criminality and mental health issues. I recently called it a romance in front of one of the few people who've read it and he practically exploded with 'How can you possibly call that a romance?!'
But from what you say about your influences, I'm quite sure we have approached this very differently. My story is told from the point of view of the girl travelling with my main character and his best friend as they struggle to come to terms with his illness and then commit to caring for him for life, so it does read like women's fiction. That's why I can't really see it as a psychological thriller, T O Bührer. Throughout the series, Peter builds a family around him to protect him from outside interferance and from hurting those he loves and it is a very family orientated story about a man trying to settle down with a wife and child as any other might.
In the beginning Peter appears to be a womanising workaholic with a heart of stone - a modern day but more charming Darcy, perhaps. The truth breaks the hearts of his friends and family and very slowly kills him over the next twenty years. Romantic it aint! But it's too easy reading to be a literary heavyweight and has none of the suspense of a thriller. It is a mystery, of sorts, but anyone picking it up hoping to read a traditional mystery would be disappointed. Largely the problems are of Peter's own doing. He gives up his health for things he wants and I expect the reader to be unsympathetic at times as there are often easier pathways he could take.
The central theme is choice and how much someone as sick as Peter should be allowed to control their own destiny. When he has the potential to kill without conscience, rage attacks he has no control over and a fairly constant death wish, is it right for his friends and family to keep his illness from doctors and the authorites? On face value, the answer is of course no, but Peter is persuasive and begs that he be allowed the same rights to a normal life as anyone else. (Not that his choices in any way carve out a normal life!) I'm hoping the reader is as torn as the characters. At what point is a human being too sick to be allowed their basic rights? Hmm, maybe I should add some of that to my synopsis!
Any other thoughts on genre would be gratefully received. Vxx