When I started writing, I didn’t care about genre because I didn’t know what it was. When I started learning about it in school, I still didn’t really care for it when I was writing. When reading, it was easy to want to pull books out of certain boxes, but when writing, there came a point where I hated trying to figure out what box my writing was going into. Like many category systems created by humans, it doesn’t fit anything and everything neatly, and so sometimes you just take the most obvious genre from the work or you give it a dual genre. I think I confused myself about it more when people would ask me what genre I was writing in, because I have to have an answer then. Usually I describe it as “some kind of mash up between X and X”.

I did an entire unit on genre when I was studying and all I really gathered from it was that there is “genre” and then there is “post-modern” and something else … (you can tell I’m not referring to any notes at all) … I learnt that you need to know a genre inside and out to write well in it, to respect it. But I really only know one genre quite well. I feel like I know the others I write in well enough that they’re fine, but this idea that you can’t write well in a genre unless you’ve read it all kind of made it difficult to branch out into new things.

I’m still half going through a phase where I refuse to read certain books because I don’t want the “writing to rub off on me”. I don’t ever want to be accused of copying or jumping on the commercial bandwagon. But I’ve come to realise that it really doesn’t matter if I read those books or not. If it ends up similar, people are going to point it out regardless. I just need to have a lot more faith in my writing. And most stories have been told before, in some shape or form, so I don’t know why I give myself such a hard time about it.

I don’t know. I don’t know why I am so worried about coming off as a fake or fraud. I’ve never stolen work or ever had someone write something on my behalf … it such a strange fear that sometimes strangles me tighter than the fear that someone will steal my work. I do know that I don’t like it.

So, we were talking about trying to pick a genre. Only twice have I ever sat down with “this is the genre I’m going to write in”. All of the “theory” only ever comes into my writing once I’ve already been taken away with it. I often don’t think about it at all. But that’s why it’s a pain in the butt, because I have to think about it.

Knowing one’s genre, or at least the duality or it or subversion of it, is important for figuring out whom you’re writing it for. Instead of categorising it in a box, I think about it more like putting it in a parcel for a specific someone and just ignore the other boxes. I stick with the biggest genre (telling myself that even if labels ignore the sub-genres, I know they’re there) and think about whether the people who read that genre would like what I have written. If they won’t, perhaps I’m thinking of the wrong genre then.