Dear Writers: You 100% don’t understand your genre
Okay, maybe you do. But I sure as heck didn’t!
Here are some storytelling tips from me, a transgender editor for best-selling and award-winning books.
ROMANCE
The easiest one for me to comment on given that I edited so many of these for romance publishers. A few of the books even won awards and hit the USA Today list!
The payoff in a Romance is TRUE LOVE FULFILLED.
As long as you deliver on that, you can do whatever you want. At least within the conventions of your genre… Especially if you’re writing for an established Category Romance line. Romance isn’t quite the same as Category Romance, but it’s close enough to mention it.
And yeah, those conventions are important. Know your readers. Etc.
But how often do those genre conventions for Romance just turn out to be traditional cishet standards that don’t fit queer people?
Push the limits of your genre — you may change the world.
ROMANTIC COMEDY
A comedy isn’t about laughter. It’s about safely experiencing embarrassment. Laughter is how we process the embarrassment. And the prize for learning how?
