Welcome friends to the first Creator’s Roulette of this year! I am hosting author TC Marti today to share about genre-bending. Books can easily fall into multiple genres and I hadn’t given much thought to how authors approach writing. Through this post, I got some insight on implementing genre-bending and the advantages of doing something different through it. Let’s welcome TC on the blog and then get started.
TC Marti is an author, book reviewer, and freelance writer. When he’s not writing, you can often find him in a gym lifting weights, or running miles on a trail. He’s also a huge fan of Arizona sports teams, an unapologetic Blink, and like most authors, an avid reader. Readers can learn about him via his author website/blog: https://tcmarti.com/
The Freedoms of Genre-Bending
By TC Marti
If you’re an author and you’re looking to write outside the box of mainstream fiction, genre-bending may be your answer.
First, what is genre-bending?
In genre-bending, you will take classic story elements, tropes, and character archetypes, and place them into a different setting. Suppose you’re writing a fantasy novel featuring epic fantasy tropes and magical systems, but you place the work into a setting that resembles something out of a sci-fi novel.
That’s genre-bending.
For authors, genre-bending offers something unique, as it does not conform to the exact norms of any specific genre. For readers, it offers a unique spin from something they enjoyed reading their favorite classics.
Odds are, you have read, or have even written a book, or books, that you can consider a genre-bender.
What makes genre-bending such a fresh writing experience?
Discover five freedoms of genre-bending below.
1 – Stretch Genre Limits
Since genre-bending books don’t conform to any single genre, you will discover the ability to stretch, and test, genre limits. Stretching the limits provides more leeway in your writing, and you can add a few more elements to your books than when you conform to specific elements and tropes within a genre.
For example, you can take sword and sorcery from old world epic fantasy and bend it into the modern world. These magic swords could, when used for war and military purposes, overpower modern weaponry. Magic supersedes tech, in other words. Or, magic even entwines with tech.
If you are writing stricter epic fantasy or sci-fi, you wouldn’t have such leeway. A sword in mainstream science fiction, for example, would not possess magical properties, but tech advancement. And in epic fantasy, swords would possess magical abilities, but would lack modern features.
Genre-bending does not only grant more freedom in sci-fi/fantasy, but also romance, where it’s becoming prevalent. The Twilight Saga provides a phenomenal example of genre-bending fantasy/romance.
In Twilight, you will find strong elements in each genre, which granted author Stephenie Meyer the freedom to stretch genre limits than authors writing strictly a romance or fantasy novel.
2 – Zero Limits to the Imagination
Genre-bending does not limit you to writing in one genre and bending the work into one other. Instead, there are zero limits to your imagination. If you have a story idea, or ideas that you have shelved because you don’t feel they conform to any one genre, or if you have a tough time placing them into a genre, they’re ideal genre-bending candidates.
If you already blend genres, chances are you either shelved a project in the past or you did not release because the work did not fit into a specific genre. Then you discovered genre-bending, which broke the barrier to any limits on the imagination.
Now you can place that epic fantasy work into a sci-fi world. Or you can bend elemental magic into a dystopian/post-apocalyptic setting. You can come up with hundreds if not thousands of different combinations, considering all the genres and subgenres online retailers provide.
You can revitalize projects you started, sputtered, and stopped working on. Gone are the restrictions on your imagination as limitless creative opportunities enter.
3 – Reach New Readers
In today’s world there are billions of readers and billions of people with internet access. Plus, worldwide communication today is easier than it has been in any other point in world history. Therefore, while readers may be interested in genre norms, there are as many readers out there interested in something different.
Sure, these readers may have their genre preferences, but they may also crave something fresh. Genre-bending will provide these readers what they want. Using epic fantasy as the example, some readers will never want to deviate from the old world, magic, dragons, castles, mountains and forests.
But others may gripe that someone, somewhere, needs to inject a new angle into the genre. Genre-bending is the antidote you can provide to these readers. This doesn’t mean you need to revolutionize the genre; that’s a tall task.
However, it also means you can find a new group of superfans that love your epic fantasy dystopia set in a twenty-second century society. Or perhaps the military fantasy where old world magical systems match up well against technologically-advanced warfare.
4 – A Unique Spin on Retellings
When many of us sat down to write our first books that we probably never published, we may have caught ourselves writing a retelling of our favorite classics.
With genre-bending, you can add something new to a retelling. An inter-galactic wizarding school set on another planet with an immortality-seeking antagonist that has split their soul and hid relics in six different worlds pursuing the protagonist?
Or, what about a witch sending a technologically-advanced nation into eternal winter and four kids from another world challenge that witch while a god-like being guides them?
Of course, these are retelling prompts for Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia. However, they feature a fresh spin because of the genre-bending element. While a few readers will see similarities and even realize your work is a retelling, others see something fresh and would be stunned when you state the book is indeed a retelling.
5 – Create a Unique Author Brand
Perhaps the final and finest freedom of genre-bending is that you have the ability to create a unique author brand. While every author brand out there is unique, chances are the brands blend together at some point. If nothing else, they blend in terms of genre.
There are thousands of authors writing in the mainstream genres. While their covers may differ, or their brand colors, their angle, whatever, they bleed together eventually. Cut from the same quilt, in other words.
Genre-bending takes things a step further. While you will find other authors who bend the same genres as you, odds are you are fewer in number. And this allows you to stand out from your author peers and take your brand’s uniqueness to another level.
Examples of Genre-Bending
If you’re looking to read a few genre-bending works, The Windhaven Witches Series and the Pendomus Chronicles by Carissa Andrews epitomize the tactic. Windhaven Witches is not necessarily a retelling of Twilight, but the daughter of a Greek Goddess entwined with the Son of the Angel of Death adds a fantasy twist to this romantic adventure.
Pendomus features epic fantasy tropes bent into a science fiction and dystopian world.
Two newer and rather obscure examples of genre-bending can be found in Kachi Ugo’s Levitators Chronicles. The work features folklore but set in today’s society. Stefanie Chu’s Alliance Series is another genre-bender, featuring both epic and contemporary fantasy tropes set in a modern-medieval world.
Sources
- https://www.writeordietribe.com/writers-craft/5-genre-bending-books-and-what-they-can-teach-us
- https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=genre%20bending
Have you read any genre-bending books? If so, which are your favorites? Tell us in the comments!
I hope you learned something new in this post by TC Marti! It has been a pleasure to host him and we will be back with another post about writing in a shared universe in the next few weeks. Connect with TC on his website https://tcmarti.com/ and check out his latest book Wind Wielder on Goodreads.
Cover Photo by Aditya Vyas on Unsplash
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