I'm curious, how do you choose which genre your writing focuses on? Do you float from genre to genre, go with what you read most? I read widely - YA, Children's, Amateur Detective, Chic-Lit, Mainstream, Literary. I enjoy Evanovich, Fitgerald (not much for Hemingway though), Allende, King, Rice, Oates, Rowland, Palahniuk. And I have ideas, characters, settings for most of these genre's in my head, in drafts of stories and in my notes. Does anyone else have trouble focusing on one? I guess it's finding my voice, but can't I have two, or three?

Betsi

I actually always gravitated straight for my genre--thriller.  I did have trouble focusing on it, though not for reasons like yours.  Thriller is not well-promoted.  It's stuck on the bookshelf with mystery and is called a mystery by many people; yet, when I read books on how to write a mystery, my stories never fit.  I was writing a thriller for years and had no idea I was doing so because of the lack of information available on the genre.

I mostly read thriller, though I may also read some fantasy, and some mysteries.  However, I should note that I learned the most about writing in thriller when I really started to focus on reading thriller.  I started seeing patterns and trends that I didn't notice when I was mixing in the other genres.

I was an active child and never had the patience to sit down with a book and read.  That is, until I came across Ian Fleming and his character James Bond.  As a youngster, I read every one of his books and that is what got me interested in the thriller/suspense genre.  Currently, my favorite authors have been John Grisham and the late Robert Ludlum. As to what genre to write, I once read that you should write that which you like and enjoy.

Linda, as a thriller writer yourself, are there any authors of the genre that you would particularly recommend???

Will I be seeing you in Phoenix at the ThrillerFest???

Turtle

When I was a kid, I used to mainly write fanstasy and sci-fi. Then when I started to write seriously (as in trying to be a writer) I pretty much tried my hand at writing everything, except for one field. And I was met with an absolute lack of success. Eventually I gave up being a writer for several years. I accidently found myself back in the game, because someone at the chruch I go to was organizing a writer group for members of our religion. So I bashed something out (having not written in several years) just so if there was time, I could have my work looked at. Ironically, I was the only one that showed up with anything written. Even stranger was the fact that I had wrote an article about a subject that the organizer of the group was going to suggest as an editorial for the small press magazine that he was an assistant editor of. While the freelancer deadine was past by a week already, I was given a week to fix the article. So to my surprise, I found myself writing in the one field that I never write about before--my religion. It started a trend, a couple of years later, I ended up being elected as an officer of the lodge that I belong to--an officership which primary job is to write lectures to be given to the members. So the primary field that I write in is something that, quite honestly, I never consider writing in before it was sprung upon me.

Outside of that, I must admit that I have chosen the method of cost-effectiveness to determine what fields I write in. There are certain subjects that I would love to write in that, alas, I just dont have enough time and energy to research to become an expert at. There are bills to be paid, so I have to have a day job; and the little writing time I have left must be used wisely, occasionally for a paid piece or two. There is also the fact that I am a forty-year old college freshman, a certain amount of my writing time is actually being spent on homework. This last semester I spent a lot of time, researching and writing about Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) for my English 122 class. I now know more about NEOs than I wanted to know; I will probably use the information in some sci-fi story or another.

So for me, at least, my choice of genres has been determined by the joint causes of luck and economics. I imagine that a lot of the professional writers out there have ended up with their genres being decided that way.