How To Figure Out What Genre To Write In
Ask yourself these 3 simple questions.
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What genre should you write in? Thriller books sell a lot of copies. So does science fiction, romance and even erotic fiction books.
A few years ago, a book marketing expert told me self-published authors earn a good living writing in these genres.
I wanted to earn a good living from writing books too.
So I spent a couple of months trying to write a thriller book that I could sell. I got up early every morning to work on it. And I hated it.
The process felt a lot more like work than anything enjoyable, and I couldn’t get the story right, let alone finish it.
I felt like I’d never become an author.
1. Are you writing the truth?
Robert McKee is a screenwriting guru that film companies like Pixar call when they have problems with their scripts. He’s also the author of the popular book every writer should read: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting.
A couple of years ago, he gave a storytelling conference in a hotel in Sligo, in the West of Ireland.
At the end of the conference, I got a chance to meet McKee. They say you should never meet your heroes, and I was a little nervous.
I thanked him for his talk and then asked, “How does a writer figure out what to write about?”
Suffice to say, I didn’t elaborate on my attempt to write lousy thrillers or erotic fiction.
He took a copy of Story from me and autographed the first page of it with this piece of advice,
“Write the truth.”
I didn’t think much about how to apply it for a couple of weeks until I started writing thrillers again.
