The Case for Genre Hopping in Fiction
By: Laura Winter
Tags: Writers On Writing, Writing, Fiction Writing, Creativity, Writing Tips

The Case for Genre Hopping in Fiction

There are ways to succeed if you approach the switching effectively

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

I’m strongly against advice that tells anyone they can’t do something if they want to be successful. I believe it’s possible to do anything if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and do some hard work. Hell, that’s why I went from being an IT management graduate to a softball coach to a media marketer to an author. That’s why I’m such a big proponent of teaching people it’s possible to find success as a self-published author without spending a fortune.

What an author should and shouldn’t write rests entirely up to the writer. The genre is also completely up to said author, and while there are a ton of articles out there arguing against genre hopping in fiction, there is definitely a way to do it without completely alienating your current audience.

Writing multiple genres gives you tons of ideas

As a prolific writer myself, I love the ability to pull from millions of different ideas and stories. If I’m not feeling capable of digging into my romantic emotions, I’ll blow stuff up with superpowers or a massive space ship. If I’m tired of the endless expanse of space, I’ll drop down to Earth and write a NA romance or fantasy story based in a town I know. There’s an endless source of ideas just ready to take me where my mood swings.

This is useful as an author with ADHD. I get incredibly obsessed with a certain story or idea and I almost overwhelm myself with getting it done. By the end of it, I never want to touch that genre again (jk, I’ll get another swing of ideas in a month). The longest I stuck with a single genre was 6 books, where I wrote a high fantasy serial for three months straight with no interruptions. I paused in the middle to switch to YA fantasy for NaNoWriMo, and I’m already itching to get back to the four book high fantasy conclusion.

You expose yourself to different techniques

Locking yourself into a single genre isn’t a pitfall, however it does create some little speed bumps down the road. I’ve been working with a fellow author who writes sword and sorcery, high fantasy. He has been writing this genre for… longer than I’ve been alive. However, he’s realized that the story he has to tell can’t just be blood and sword fights. He needs a touch of romance, hence my support.

This isn’t a bad thing. We can all learn from multiple genres, but it requires a willingness to open up to those techniques. Adding splices of knowledge from different genres doesn’t make your writing worse; it makes it so much better. My fellow author has inspired so many of my own action scenes after reading his stories — a genre that wouldn’t be something I wrote, yet has taught me how to write action scenes. Now, I get to share my romance writing tips to help him connect with a different piece of his story.

Different genres allow you to reach new readers

Have you ever loved a writer so much you’re willing to read everything they publish? There are people like that in your audience (maybe not yet, but there will be the more you publish).

Have you ever discovered an entire backlog of material from an author you happened upon? Have you ever learned of an author’s pen name and immediately gone to check out those books as well, even if they aren’t in the original genre?

Some answers might be no, but if that’s the case, they were never going to keep reading your work anyway. But what about the audience that said yes to those questions? Why aren’t you keeping them all the way through? It’s possible to stumble on an author and discover multiple worlds, and if you love the writing enough, wouldn’t you be willing to test out something new? You never know… a space opera fanatic might find some inspiration in that little romantic short story you wrote as well.