The Genre Battle: Spiritual Fiction

I found an interesting site that outlines all the genres: Book Country Genre Map.

This site also led me to understand why I have such difficulty appending genres to my works.

Science, one religion out of many, has a huge category all to itself. All other works must be imaginary (this would make a nice separate category--I have an imaginary short coming up), romance, historical, or mystery/thriller/horror. I was surprised at how many stories I could think of that did not fall into one of those categories.

There are also broad "genres" that demonstrate the lack of descriptive categories, such as:

• women's fiction (Which is still just a misleading name for romance? Another disappointment.)
• young adult (Oh, you mean 18-25, right? What? 12-18? Since when is a 12-year-old an adult?)
• literary fiction

In these instances, it's an attempt to appeal to a particular audience but exchanges the use of the aforementioned categories. Of course, you can append additional genres on these, but it still becomes Women's Fantasy or YA Historical. Plenty of classics are haphazardly cast into the literary fiction category. (Let's not forget the tiny isle of nonfiction.)

At least, this is the vibe I get from discussions and applications of genre.

So, I decided to classify my works as spiritual fiction. It's a simple label that will apply to most of what I write. It's still an undescriptive label, but my point is those that have been firmly established have established themselves in a way that screams they are the only way. I'm glad I found a genre I fit under, but it's upsetting that there's little representation for other types of writing.

Why does a writer write what they write? Why does a fantasy author stick to fantasy or a historical author stick to history?

I would assume that it's because they're doing what they love.

If science fiction or fantasy were the only genres available, of course eventually someone would break the shell somehow, but authors, despite what they personally liked, would write SF/F until they felt they liked it. Because in a world were they were the only genres, writing SF/F would be what made a person an author. And if one loved writing books, it would therefore be necessary that they like SF/F.

There's some confusing logic for the day. Hopefully, my genre confusion ends here!

Free Beta Readers Question Template

Have you completed your fiction novel and you're considering getting another set of eyes to look over it? Have you already found someone to do it, but you're not sure how to express what you want them to look for?

Here is a template I created for questioning beta readers. These are general questions I developed for my own novel, so they don't cover areas I didn't feel I had problems with. I may, however, return and improve on this template.

How to Use

The questions in the template can be used to brainstorm your own questions, do your first edit, or they can be sent directly to your beta reader through email, Skype, mail, forum, etc.

Use the questions that you feel are most specific to your novel. For instance, asking both if you should have less foreign words and if you should have more is strange. Either you feel it might not have been necessary to include foreign words, or you might be aware that you restricted their usage.

Also, add you own explanations/details to the questions and delete mine as you see fit (I am the parentheses master.).

Enjoy!