NaNoWriMo Prep, Part Two: Choosing A Genre

The first step in preparing you to tackle your 50k this November is to have an idea of what genre you're going to be writing in. Genre is important for a number of reasons. It can give you information that will help you structure your book, information that can help you in plotting it, and things that can be useful in marketing and keywords later. While you don't have to know the genre before writing, you'll need it if you want to take advantage of tools that are fairly genre-specific (plot graphs, for example) and if you're planning on using the NaNoWriMo site to track your writing, you'll need something to put in the genre section.

                                                 Step One
If you don't have a story idea, decide what genre you're most interested in. If you do have a story idea, then examine the various genres and pick which one fits it best.

Examples of genres are romance, fantasy, horror. There are plenty more than that, and a lot of sub-genres as well. As an example, my book Isolde could be classed as dark fantasy, a sub-genre within fantasy. My husband's book The Shadow and the Wolf would be classed as epic fantasy, another sub-genre for fantasy.

According to The Richest, the most popular genres (and therefore the ones that make the most money) are horror, sci-fi/fantasy, religious/inspirational, crime/mystery, and romance/erotica, with romance and erotica topping the list. If you're a professional writer looking to make decent money, you might be better off choosing one of these five. If, however, you're doing it for fun, then by all means ignore it and do what interests you.

                                                Step Two
Once you have your genre chosen, you should narrow it down and decide if you need a sub-genre. An urban fantasy, for example, is a fantasy and has fantasy elements such as magic or monsters. But it's also not the kind of fantasy most people think of when they hear the word, because the story is in an urban setting. I personally would class the Percy Jackson books as urban fantasy.

                                               Step Three
Look up typical plot points for your genre. It's fairly easy to class genre works, since there are various parts that make each type work or not work based on the typical audience and what readers expect from the genre as a whole. The plot for a romance novel, for example, has what's referred to as the black moment, the moment where the main character and the love interest seem like they're never going to be together. It also, obviously, includes a romance as the main plot.

                                                Step Four
The genre you choose may also dictate roughly how long your novel sis expected to be, so finding an average word-length is also part of our section on genre. Fantasy is expected to be longer than romance, since fantasy requires world-building, something not often required in romance. Children's books are usually much shorter, since children typically can't read very well and often have short attention spans.

For some basic ideas on how to decide word length, you can look here, for an excellent article on the subject. If you're expecting to send it in to publishers, then there may be a specific word count they expect to see. If you go over, there's a chance they might reject it just because of that. Even if you're an independent publisher, it would be useful to have an idea of how long readers are going to expect your book to be.

What genre are you writing in this year?