Hi! This is my first time on a writing forum and I need help. I am writing a story but I can't tell which genre it is. My story is about a girl and a boy who were raised together since the boy's mother was the girl's nanny and they grew up to be bestfriends. The boy eventually moved out to the big city to live his dream. After loosing contact for almost 2 years, his bestfriend comes in town asking him to go on an adventure : travel with her to a small city to follow a myth/legend. The story will probably be around maybe 2o - 30,000 words, I am still at the begining and wrote around 7,000 words. Since it will be quite short, I thought of publishing it through Amazon/Kindle. I thought it could be a young adult story but apparently a 21 year-old main character doesn't work. I've also read that adult books have mature themes/content which my story doesn't have. Does anyone have an idea what genre my story falls in? Tank you
It'll be a novella, and adult rather than YA. Whether it's middle grade/young adult/adult doesn't depend on themes but on the age of the main character. Is the myth/legend real, and something that we don't find in real life? E.g. they go in search of dragons and find dragons. If that's the case, you're probably in one of the fantasy subgenres. If not, it's harder to tell from the info you've given. What's the major 'tone' of the book - scary? Heart-racing? Funny? Fun and frolicks? Is there lots of action or is it more about the character interactions and development?
The legend says whoever helps free a citizen from a certain village will be granted eternal happiness (it was inspired by the Omelas story), besides that, there's nothing surreal or magical, no fancy creatures, no super powers. The story concentrates more on the interactions and relationships between caracters. Thank you for your reply
I guess urban fantasy? Road fantasy? I wouldn't get too hung up on genre though. Write the story the way you want to write it first, rewrite, polish, edit, write again, and by the time you've done all that it'll be much more obvious what genre it can be slotted into or how to publish. Take it one step at a time.
But there is nothing fantastic nor magical in my story, the legend says whoever helps citizens from a certain village will be granted eternal happiness :/ I think I'll follow Tenderiser and say it's Adult since the plot is mainly about the friendship between the characters, but thank you for your reply
Well, that sounds like magic. I'm not saying that it has to set your genre for you, but it's certainly not normal follows-the-laws-of-physics reality.
It doesn't matter what genre it is until it's written. Write the story, get feedback/critique and then decide how you want to describe it.
It's the 2nd time someone says I should wait until the story is done. I understand that the category in which a story falls in should be the last thing to worry about but I don't understand how the genre will be more clear once the story is completed. If I can't seem to make it fit into a specific category since the first chapters, how will it be different at the end?
Isn't magic like Harry Potter? There will be no magical moment where the characters will be granted eternal happiness, they'll just realise they are happy
Genre is a very blunt tool that takes a lot of things into account, tone being one of them. A story can have no acts of magic by any definition and still fall into a fantasy-adjacent genre. It's not just about the series of events in the story. Your description of your plot could still fall into a range of genres, urban fantasy included. It could be magical realism, slipstream, low fantasy, a whole array of subgenres that are wildly different and would still have room for what you've described. With that in mind: "Genre" as a concept is ill-defined, unwieldy, imprecise and ultimately unhelpful on an artistic level. It is a marketing thing first and foremost. At its core, it has very little to do with artistic expression. This is why people keep telling you to not focus on it. As an author, and presumably a person who wants to express some sort of artistic impulse, it doesn't make sense to write around marketing conventions. Writing is organic. I've never heard of a single author who finished a story exactly the way they thought they would when they first started writing it. Genre is a construct. It is a label you put on stories to gain a certain audience, so readers know how to find things they might enjoy in a bookstore or online. It is not the writer's business to worry about that, it's the publisher's. So either you're asking us to put a label on something that doesn't exist yet, or you're asking us to help you create something to fit a label. Neither of those is an artistically honest way of writing, so there's not much we can help with.
I'm going to disagree a bit on the "genre doesn't matter to the writer" arguments. If you're writing primarily as a form of artistic/personal expression, I totally agree with that approach. Write what you want, what feels right, what says what you want to say, etc. This sounds like your approach, OP. But for others? If you're writing for publication? If that's your ultimate goal? It seems nonsensical to ignore the realities of the publishing world. There are different conventions in different genres. There are trends in genres, ideas that are novel or overused, characters that are frequently seen or rarely seen, etc. Writing a story blind to these realities, if publication is your main goal, doesn't make sense. And obviously you can't educate yourself about the realities if you don't actually know what genre you're writing, or if you're writing in a genre at all.
That is very true. It never hurts to be aware. I just kind of assume that people who write are people who read, and that they're aware of the broad strokes of what's trending, so to speak. But yes, good point, well taken.
Thank you for all your replies! I was not thinking about publishing my stories until my friends suggested it to me. So when I looked for writing contests and online publishing platforms, they all asked for the story's genre and I thought it's something I should worry about.