WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

 

By Beverley Oakley

  “Write what you know.”

 Many of us are familiar with this conventional piece of advice: Write what you know because it’s the best way to infuse our stories with reality.

 But reality can be hard to define.

 The last thirty books I’ve written are set in the Regency and Victorian eras. Years of enjoyable research into the history, manners, politics, and clothing of the time have provided my stories’ plot and color.

 Love, passion, hope and other human emotions are universal and transcend time and country, so this combination equals reality for me as an historical romance author.

 

 

But lately I’ve been at a crossroads. Continue writing what I know through painstaking research?

 Or write what I know from having lived it?

 In my twenties and thirties, I travelled the world on airborne geophysical survey contracts based in Africa, South America and Europe, often as the only woman on small crews of ten to fourteen.

At the end of each day, following a turbulent eight hours surveying the steamy South American jungle in a light aircraft at 250ft above ground, or being thrown around over the Greenlandic Icecap, the last thing I felt like was to write fiction in a familiar setting.

 I wanted to escape into a world of chandeliers, castles, cotillions and Regency glamour.

 Now, I realize that choosing to write about a world separated from my own by two hundred years, and a continent away, was, at the time, my safe space.

 Writing those Regencies romances gave me the outlet I needed and, I hope, provided readers with satisfying adventures in ballrooms and drawing rooms, and with feel-good endings.

 But as I contemplate being an ‘empty-nester’ twenty years later, I find myself looking for the kind of rush that buying a new sportscar might bring for some.

 I need change to keep my life interesting.

 And as I have no intention of spending big on something new and flashy, or altering my happy home-life with my gorgeous hubby, slavishly loyal, 62kg Rhodesian Ridgeback, and funny, clever teenage daughter, I’ve decided that the answer to my¾call it a midlife writing crisis¾is to write in a new genre.

 To write what I really know: Africa set crime, mystery and romance.

 I’ve made a good start. My first book is finished but unedited, with a romantic action adventure based around my dad’s stories of his work prosecuting medicine murder and illegal diamond trading in the African mountain kingdom of Lesotho where I grew up in the 60s.

And my second romantic suspense is half written, set in the luxury safari lodges of Botswana’s pristine Okavango Delta, where I met my Norwegian bush pilot husband the day before I was to leave the island I called home, to fly back to Australia to marry my boyfriend of seven years.

 

I’ll admit that changing genres is scary and that writing what you really know is hard when the present throws up living challengers to your perspective on history and politics. Even your own story.

 But I’ve resolved to be brave.

 The time has come for me to emerge from my English castle and step back into the African deserts, mountains, and wetlands of my youth.

 ***

Beverley Eikli writes Historical Romance as Beverley Oakley, and Africa-set crime fiction and romance as B. G Nettelton. You can read more about her Regency and Victorian romances at: www.beverleyoakley.com and her Africa-set romantic suspense at: www.bgnettelton.com with her new website under construction.

 

 

Writing Genres - Susan Horsnell

WRITING GENRES

Genre is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or entertainment, e.g. music, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria.

Genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued.

Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.


These are just a few different genres:

Action

An action story is similar to adventure, and the protagonist usually takes a risky turn, which leads to

desperate situations (including explosions, fight scenes, daring escapes, etc.). Action and Adventure are usually categorized together (sometimes even as "action-adventure") because they have much in common, and many stories fall under both genres simultaneously (for instance, the James Bond series can be classified as both)

Adventure

An adventure story is about a protagonist who journeys to epic or distant places to accomplish something. It can have many other genre elements included within it, because it is a very open genre. The protagonist has a mission and faces obstacles to get to her destination. Also, adventure stories usually include unknown settings and characters with prized properties or features

Comedy

Comedy is a story that tells about a series of funny or comical events, intended to make the audience laugh. It is a very open genre, and thus crosses over with many other genres on a frequent basis.

Crime

A crime story is about a crime that is being committed or was committed. It can also be an account of a criminal's life. It often falls into the Action or Adventure genres.

Fantasy

A fantasy story is about magic or supernatural forces, rather than technology, though it often is made to include elements of other genres, such as science fiction elements, for instance computers or DNA, if it happens to take place in a modern or future era.

Historical Fiction

A story that takes place in the real world, with real world people, but with several fictionalized or dramatized elements. This may or may not crossover with other genres; for example, fantasy fiction or science fiction may play a part, as is the case for instance with the novel George Washington's Socks, which includes time travel elements.

 

Horror

A horror story is told to deliberately scare or frighten the audience, through suspense, violence or

shock. The supernatural variety is occasionally called "dark fantasy", since the laws of nature must be violated in some way, thus qualifying the story as "fantastic"

 

Mystery

Although normally associated with the crime genre, mystery fiction is considered a completely different genre in certain circumstances where the focus is on supernatural mystery (even if no crime is involved). This distinction was common in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, where titles such as Dime Mystery, Thrilling Mystery and Spicy Mystery offered what at the time were described as "weird menace" stories – supernatural horror in the vein of Grand Guignol. This contrasted with parallel titles of the same names which contained conventional hardboiled crime fiction. The first use of "mystery" in this sense was by Dime Mystery, which started out as an ordinary crime fiction magazine but switched to "weird menace" during the latter part of 1933. There are also subgenre mysteries like puzzle mysteries.

Romance

Traditionally, a romance story involves chivalry, adventure and love. In modern writing, a story about character's relationships, or engagements (a story about character development and interpersonal relationships rather than adventures). It has produced a wide array of subgenres, the majority of which feature the mutual attraction and love of a man and a woman as the main plot, and have a happy ending. This genre, much like fantasy fiction, is broad enough in definition that it is easily and commonly seen combined with other genres, such as comedy, fantasy fiction, realistic fiction, or action-adventure.

Urban

Urban fiction, also known as Street lit, is a literary genre set, as the name implies, in a city landscape; however, the genre is as much defined by the race and culture of its characters as the urban setting. The tone for urban fiction is usually dark, focusing on the underside. Profanity (all of George Carlin's seven dirty words and urban variations thereof), sex and violence are usually explicit, with the writer not shying away from or watering-down the material. In this respect, urban fiction shares some common threads with dystopian or survivalist fiction. Often statements derogatory to white people (or at least what is perceived as the dominant Eurocentric culture and power structure) are made, usually by the characters. However, in the second wave of urban fiction, some variations of this model have been seen.

Until Next Month
Stay Safe, Good Reading

Sue

 

Susan Horsnell

Western Romance Author

Email: horsnells@yahoo.com.au

Blog: http://susanhorsnell.com

Web: http://horsnells.wix.com/susan--1   

Overheard on . . . Romancing the Genres

“What do you write?”
“Contemporary Womens Fiction with strong Romantic and Comedic Elements.”
<pause>
“So, Romance then?”

There are practically as many subgenres in Contemporary Romance as there are contemporary stories written. I have always found it difficult to tell people what I write. For the longest time my answer was Contemporary Romance. Then, at a workshop one time, I learned that my stories fit better into the Genre of Women’s Fiction.

Better… but not perfectly. My writing is a mixture of many different subgenres. Publishers aren’t thrilled by this. They like to know exactly how to market a book, where to sell it and where to shelve it.

From an early age readers are taught to look for books in narrow fields:  Fiction/nonfiction, Fantasy/history/speculative/comedy, etc. (For a thorough list of genres linkhere to Wikipedia )

Do you remember the Dewey Decimal System and the card catalogs? Well nowadays kids use a computer program very like Goodreads to find books. It allows them to search by grade or reading level. They can ‘like’ a book and find others like it. They can even recommend favorite books to their friends (within a closed school system for safety!)

Helping children use this system I discovered something interesting. Since these computer generated searches are based on user preference rather than pre-determined categories, diverse genres appear for a similar topic. For example, search on ‘lion’ and you might get poems about lions, non-fiction books about them, or a myth with a lion in it. While each clearly says what category it falls into, no longer are we locked into seeing topics in only one light.

What does this mean as readers and writers? Because of Goodreads and systems like the above we can begin to use a new language to describe books and our writing.

In April Romancing the Genres gets to spotlight some wonderful Contemporary Authors. I’m sure each of them, like myself, has a different take on this wide genre. So instead of asking them about what they write, ask them what their readers like about their books. You may find your own new way of categorizing your favorite reads.

Many Happy Journeys Inspired by Love -
Deanne
www.deannewilsted.com