The pros

Still, I believe there are many reasons to take the plunge into another genre. We have a whole lot to learn from our brethren writing in other genres. We can rummage through their toolboxes for tools we can use in our own genre. For example, learning fiction craft will help the creative non-fiction writer with dialogue and structure, and the poet and screenwriter learn how to find that meat, that substance that gives the novel its heft and depth.

 

A novelist, in turn, can learn so much from the poet when it comes to language or eliciting emotion or talking about the abstract through description of the concrete. Novelists have been borrowing from the screenwriter’s toolbox for a very long time, using screen structure, that Save the Cat! structure, to map out our stories, to understand our protagonist’s conflicts and story goals.

 

For years, I’ve been sending the literary writers I work with to what we usually think of as commercial structures: the mystery, romance, gothic and horror, sci-fi and, of course, the thriller, which has always been one of my favorite genres. From our commercial brethren, the literary writer can come to fully understand structure and story goals, about narrative drive and what keeps a reader reading. The key, as always, though, is to never view these various structures as a template, a plan, or our stories will feel formulaic. Rather, we should use the study of these structures as a brainstorming tool that helps us find our own unique structure for our project.

 

Yet another bonus of writing in other genres is that it can open up whole other markets and surprising opportunities. For example, my YA hi-lo book Iggy’s World was just picked up by a publisher in Korea,  was a JLG Gold Standard Selection and short-listed for the Chocolate Lily Book Awards. My three hi-lo thrillers, the Claire Abbott series, are about to be published in Sweden. And my hi-lo middle school novella The Ride Home was short-listed for a BC and Yukon Book Prize. These were all delightful surprises that would never have had happened if I hadn’t risked stepping into this new educational market. The biggest reward for me was the new audience I met, many new readers who fell in love with reading through the books I and other hi-lo authors had penned.

 

And, of course, a writer can blend genres within one work, to create fresh takes on old structures. How about a sci-fi mystery? Or fantasy romance? Or environmental sci-fi thriller? Once it was difficult to find a home for a cross-genre project, but now cross-genre novels are really taking off and increasingly gaining audiences.