Switching Genres

How to move from writing realism to speculative genres

It’s hard out here for a fantasy writer, after all; there’s all these ‘rules’ I’m supposed to follow, or the Fantasy Police might come and make me do hard labor in the Cold Iron Mines.

— N. K. Jemisin

A Twitter friend recently asked me to do an article on how writers can switch between genres — between writing “realism” or literary fiction and speculative genres like scifi, fantasy, and horror. One of the biggest things I want to emphasize before I jump in with some tips for this is that genre itself is a myth.

What I mean is that when we talk about genres, we refer to marketing labels that publishing has created in order to sell books. They are things that belong in a query letter. Talking about What a Genre Is can be reductive because it forces us to acknowledge that someone else is making the rules, and that person may not actually be concerned with story or what readers want. We end up in an argument. An argument which often emphasizes a canon that marginalizes people of color and women — a canon that is by nature exclusionary.