In preparation for NaNoWriMo in a couple months, where I may be tackling the first draft of the first part of the Imperial Story, I've started reading How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. While I have a ton of writing books, this is the only one I've found that was genre-specific and written by an author I've actually heard of. I'd like to say I've read every book in existence, but that's not the case.
Card brings up an interesting point, in the beginning of the book. Science fiction writers, he says, are always going to be science fiction writers, pegged by the industry as it were. While there's lots of freedom to work within the genre, if an author writes, say, a nonfiction book, it's not placed with his other sci-fi works and it makes it much easier for readers not to find the latest work and therefore, not sell as well.
This is a thought that hadn't occurred to me. The Imperial Story is my first attempt at actually writing sci-fi, though I've been reading it for years, since I was a kid. My attempts at scenes in writing practice have been somewhat successful, but I've mainly been concentrating on getting the characters down and figuring out what voice to use to tell the story; the details of the world have a long way to go. I'm not sure everything makes sense on the page as well as it does in my head. But that's what drafting and practice is for; nothing's set in stone, not by a long shot.
But is this a genre I want to stick with for my entire career? If it ends up being of publishable quality, it'll be something to think about. And I'll have to keep it mind as I write, to make this the best work I can. Either way, I see it as a challenge, and I don't want to back down from it.
We'll see how I feel once the drafting process is complete, and how successful I feel the story is. And if it makes sense to anyone else, readers who haven't been listening to me babble on and on for months now.
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In a solid setting like Borders/Barnes & Noble, yes, what Card wrote is true. But if you think about it from a virtual perspective, if you were to type your name in a search engine on Amazon, the option for all your written works to show up would be there.
ReplyDeleteAnd say, if you were to write some kind of non-fiction book, say a biography, there are different kinds of readers for different genres. Or if you wrote a local history book, of course your audience would be smaller and the book would be "less successful" but if you are that driven to write it, why not do it anyway?
Then there's the world of self-publishing, where you are responsible for marketing yourself. Publishing rules are constantly changing.
Don't let the what ifs hold you back :)