After a conversation with a friend, I got thinking about why I was drawn to romance, and why it was the only genre I’ve written in, especially because there are other genres I’m interested in. And because this is where I share most of my thoughts when it comes to writing, you get to hear about them.
Honestly, I started reading romance because both of my grandmas and my mom read romance. I’ve read almost every Nicholas Sparks book, and though I don’t read his work anymore, it did definitely shape who I am, as a person and a writer. I also got really into teen romance when I was younger, specifically Kasie West. Again, I don’t read her anymore, but I think I learned a lot from both of those authors. Nowadays, I’m not reading a lot of romance, but Beth O’Leary is one of my favourite romance authors. I read one of her books, “The Flatshare”, at least once a year. And Mom, I know you’re reading this, and no, I haven’t read it yet this year.
Because I consumed a lot of romance novels in my youth (and yes, saying that makes me sound significantly older than I am), it seemed natural to me that that was the genre I was going to write in. Technically speaking, my books are actually too long to be marketed as romance, since traditional romance novels run between 50,000-70,000 words, and I have no self control, so my novels are almost all over 100,000 words. And though I do say that I write romance, I also feel like a lot of my stories are coming of age, or what’s defined as women’s literature. Whatever you want to call it, I love writing characters falling in love, because I think that’s one of the most beautiful things we do as humans.
I mentioned that there were other genres I was interested in, and I’m sure you’re wondering what they are. If you read my post about writing with distractions, I mentioned that I like listening to true crime podcasts. I bring this up because I would love to write a crime novel, and the reason I haven’t is because I don’t think I’ve read enough in the genre to do it well yet. For a very long time, I was scared of reading thrillers, because my brain would always get way too anxious reading them. Now, though, since I listen to true crime so much, I’ve started to appreciate the art form of them. Part of the reason that I want to write a crime novel is because of Agatha Christie, who is arguably the best mystery writer of all time. I wouldn’t expect a crime novel from me for a few years, but just know that’s lingering in the back of my brain.
The other genre I want to write in is fantasy. And not to be shady, but not the smutty fantasy that’s blowing up on TikTok. I’m thinking more Tolkien-esque. If you’ve read one of my very first blog posts about the ghosts of past projects, you would know that I actually have a fully finished fantasy novel sitting on my computer at this very moment. You would also know that it will never see the light of day as it stands, but I do have some news regarding a fantasy project. I can’t promise anything, but I’m currently throwing around ideas of combining the various ideas I’ve had for fantasy novels in the past to create something epic. It would be full of queer characters and have deep lore and magic, which I think is an underappreciated subgenre of fantasy.
Now, you might be asking yourself, why hasn’t she written fantasy if she’s clearly so interested in doing it? And the short answer is that I’m lazy. To expand on that, plotting a fantasy novel is a lot of work if you’re setting your novel in a fictional world, which I wanted to do. World building is a huge facet of fantasy, and to be honest, I haven’t come up with a story that I think is good enough to be worth all of that work. I might be onto something now, but we’ll see about that.
The same reason goes for why I’ve never written a historical romance. I’ve read some of the more famous historical romances (looking at you, Jane Austen), but the research that would go into it hasn’t made it worth it for me. I would rather write a modern romance, and tell the best version of that story that I can, instead of getting bogged down in the details of the historical period I was writing in. However, writing about the prohibition and the 1920s would be incredible, since I’m deeply fascinated by that.
I guess the moral of this story is that I want to write in other genres, and I will, but right now, romance has my heart, and she probably always will.
That's all for now, folks!
-C
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