Authors debate plot vs. character, as if the two were gladiators, waging war on the sands of the Coliseum in some winner-take-all death battle. Both sides of the debate claim a definitive superiority for their chosen gladiator, and for the most part, the battle splits nicely down the lines of literary and commercial fiction, the […]
December 6, 2009 by 62 Comments Writing LifeWhy You Should Write More Than One Genre
Think of a well-known author. Who’d you pick? Maybe you chose Stephen King, Janet Evanovich, John Grisham, or Nora Roberts? Whomever you chose, I’m willing to bet that when the name popped to mind so did a very definite sense of genre. Why Are Book Genres So Important? Each of the authors I mentioned is […]
August 23, 2009 by 42 Comments Writing InspirationWhy Genre Writing Could Kill Your Career
The title of this week’s post is easily a very controversial, debatable, and in some respects downright wrong statement. After all, we have only to look at the latest copy of the New York Times to see that the fiction categories in its bestseller lists are inevitably headed by established genre writers. Very obviously, genre […]
