Experimenting with genres

[W_L]

Question for authors:

How do writers experiment with other genre of stories, i.e. Romance, Sports, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, History, and so on?

For me, technical speculative fiction and science fiction were and still are my chief interests in writing. I'll be experimenting with a modern fiction soon, remote from my prior writing style. A down to earth drama about corruption and power, centered around a semi-fictional version of Boston, my current city of residence. Reason why I am doing this is due to the need to write with an anchor to what I know and what exists around me as points of context, while I experiment with a new genre. It's not difficult to write this story.

I thought there may be many other approaches to experimenting with genres that are not your not natural storytelling interest, maybe we can share it with one another. My way is to create anchors of reality.

 

Edited October 11, 2020 by W_L

[Talo Segura]

Creating anchors into reality is an excellent method and one I use myself. Writing different genres shows courage and an eagerness to experiment and develop. I like to do the same. I often read what people, other authors, say about writing different genres. Simply Google "how to write a mystery story." Not that I am going to follow the formulas, but it helps to know how others think and go about it.

I recently discovered, through searching and reading links, that John le Carré, a famous writer of spy thrillers and an author whose books I love, doesn't plot his stories, but allows them to develop. Simply having an ending in mind, he lets the stories wander wherever the characters take them. 

I think that a good writer can write in many different genres, if you think about it, often they do already. The Sci-fi, fantasy, has romance and drama, even murder and mystery, etc. What makes a story great is not the genre, but the quality of the writing. I like to have sub-plots and develop a few storylines. I think character development, including secondary characters is important. The genre you can also warp to meet your own style and imagination. The murder mystery can have a supernatural element, provided the reader knows this and it isn't simply a ploy to compensate for lack of plot. One of the worst stories, an epic by different authors, which I read, engaged the reader in a dramatic future scenario of drama, action, and political revolution, before introducing, halfway through, aliens and super normal powers. A complete surprise and unexpected change of genre that destroyed the story for me. Surprises, twists and turns, I like, warping a story without letting the reader know at the start, I don't like.