Mixing and Matching: It's Important to Keep Things Fresh

I was working on my novel the other day, when I got thinking about Genres, what it all means.

I make no attempt to disguise my desire to write full-time, but neither do I plan to stop being me along the way. I write because it is fun and because in essence I can do whatever I want with my characters. *Dance my little flying monkeys. Dance I say*

With this in mind I decided 'What the Hell' and charged off on a tangent. Well not really a tangent but rather off into a new genre mid novel. Why? Because I can. Simple right? I mean I am not jumping from horror to comedy or to a romantic scene on some moonlit beach, but rather I decided to try my hand at writing something different. Steampunk.

I had never heard of this genre before last month. I only stumbled upon it when I joined a writers group on Facebook. It had the word Horror in the title originally and so I went for it. Now it references simply Steampunk, but I have been allowed to remain and wanted to do something to feel as though I had earned my place amongst their ranks.

It just so happened that in my novel, the main group of characters that we follow, have been thrown into one of the many cities of Hell. This one an alternate universe located close to the center, and just beyond its outskirts lies the Castle of Avici, where they must rescue Richard. (Anyway enough of that). I thought what better place to try something than here. I have turned this city into a 4 story metropolis fill with clockwork elevators and, steam-powered cars and automobiles, and hybrid planes and machines that will function on both. The premise is simple, each layer is covered by a large skyscraper like building, each standing for one of the four horsemen. Therefore each level is a different theme. Pestilence, Famine, War and Death.

I am not completely sure how my journey into Steampunk will turn out, or if it will even be kept, as I do not wish of offend any other writers of this quite remarkable and intriguing genre, but I am interested to find out.

You may ask why I did this? It was not just because I could. No I have a method to my madness (…kind of). I was looking at my novels the other day and nearly all of them are horror, and the large majority of those are Stephen King. I also had the Kathy Reichs novels but had to leave them in England when I moved.  But this got me thinking, about genres and comfort zones. There is an incredible wealth of information out there. So many genres and untapped ideas or links between concepts that we may be missing because we are too closed off about what we are writing.,

I look at what a lot of people talk about and follow, and I notice that YA writers, read YA novels, and so they should, the same way I should be reading horror, digesting every morsel until it is seared into my brain. Yet sometimes it is good to pick up something completely different. To study it, to enjoy it, you never know what inspiration you may get.

I decided that if I were to introduce something in a totally different genre, with just enough changes (and luckily a setting that fits both perfectly) into my novel, I can maybe introduce people to something that ordinarily they would not normally read.

Take a moment to consider your genre, what other genres are there in close relation to it, yet different enough to be standalone. Would you consider writing a scene, a story, even a novel in that genre? If not why? Fear of not capturing it correctly? of the damage a bad book can do to a writers reputation? Or is it just an uncomfortable thought to write about something you do not know?

We are creatures of habit that much we all know, and this is no more evident that with people who read, but new habits can be formed, old ones broken or reshaped. So what is it that holds us back?