Crossing the Streams

Airways... a science fiction sport story cross

 Welcome to the blog hop for March. The challenge this month was to talk about crossing the genres.

Maybe you remember Ghostbusters? Never, ever cross the streams. Until they did, and it worked beautifully in a chaotic sort of way. 

Well, back in the day, genres were pretty clearly defined. We had family stories, pony stories, detective stories, historical novels, school stories, animal stories, romance, westerns, fantasy, science fiction, adventure, horror, ballet stories and a few others. Some of these were mainly, or always, for children. In the sixties, problem novels popped up. All those genres! Seriously! And some were perceived as being more worthy than others. And after a while, there was another shift. In this one, the literary novel was split off from the genre novels, and was held to be more worthy.

I noticed all this but it never affected what I read with one rare exception: I knew Mum disapproved of books by Enid Blyton. To this day I have no idea why. I don't think I ever asked her. I do remember reading a Blyton book someone had given me in private. Other than that, I read what I wanted, wherever I got the chance.

It wasn't until I was in my thirties, trying to make sense of the romance genre, when I realised the crucial difference between romances I enjoyed and those I didn't. I'm sure you've guessed what it was, given the nature of this month's challenge.

Okay. You got it. The ones I enjoyed were almost all cross genre. The few "pure" romances I liked were all atypical in some other way.  I liked historical romances, science fiction romances, futuristic romances, fantasy romances, adventure romances...and the list goes on. I like the relationship growth in romance but so often the tension comes from conflict artificially constructed to keep the lovers apart. In cross-genre romances, the conflicts can be more organic...they can come from the reality of the stories and from the other story that happens in parallel.

Romance is not the only genre that benefits from a bit of crossing the streams, either. Mysteries benefit from an unusual setting. One of my favourite cross-genre mysteries was also science fiction. Legacy of the Sky Wasp... I thought it was brilliant.

As for my own writing, I rarely write pure genre. My latest story, Queen of the Sidhe, is a coming of age romance with mystery, a historical setting and a nice dash of Celtic myth thrown in.

So--what's your favourite way of crossing the streams?

Check out what my blog hop friends have to say on the subject.

Bob Rich -- https://wp.me/p3Xihq-3ET

Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog

Anne Stenhouse http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com (Graham)

Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/

Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea

 

Comments

  1. SkyewriterMarch 21, 2026 at 6:12 AM

    Like you, if I look back, I was drawn to the romance novels that didn't exactly fit the narrow confines of the publishing world. Example: I loved Georgette Heyer and hated Barbara Cartland. They say love makes the world go around so why not include it in other genres. But by the same token, ignoring everything else that might affect our lovers in romance makes the book pretty bland.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Landscapes of My Mind - Creating Fictional Settings

Image
The round robin this month is a wonderful subject... creating fictional settings. Creating fictional settings is one of my favourite things to do. I've always loved reading about landscapes of the mind- p laces that don't exist- so long as the author makes them  seem  as if they do. The whole concept has a long and grand history. Plato did it so convincingly that even two thousand years later some people choose to believe Atlantis once sank beneath the waves rather than rose from a Greek man’s imagination. I've never invented any place as ambitious as Atlantis, but I've been creating my own settings for almost as long as I remember. Back in the 1970s, I created a farming district I named Springford as a main setting for my first published book, a collection of linked stories called  Her Kingdom for a Pony.  I didn't use the real farming district in which I lived, because I wanted freedom to use features that didn't exist. Having developed a taste for it, I...
Read more

Cliched Situations

   Today's blog-hop topic is  Finding compelling conflict and avoiding clichés .  As usual, this is an interesting challenge, both in reality and in describing... if you see what I mean. It offers lots of possible approaches. I've chosen to focus on clichéd situations and their role in compelling conflict rather than on verbal clichés...  So, to clichéd situations.  Many genres and sub-genres rely on genre-specific tropes, or givens. I don't regard these as clichés in the parameters of this piece, and indeed they can be used in varied ways to avoid that clichéd feeling. What I find of more interest is situations that are commonly used to create conflict or action, but which contravene the  would-he-really  test. Let's look at a few of these. 1. Character One (let's call her Jane) overhears a conversation, whether in reality or via phone, or even by reading part of a letter/email. Jane immediately decides Character Two, a friend, mentor, ...
Read more

Characters to Go

Image
 This month's blog hop topic is  Creating Compelling Characters who drive the plot and keep readers reading . My heading is somewhat of a cheat, in that it's the title of one of my how-to writing manuals which I produced years ago in concert with my assessment and editing service. Eventually, I combined a dozen or so of the manuals into one giant edifice (truly, you could use the thing as a stepladder) with a long title. Characters to Go became a part of that. Mind, I'm not simply reproducing chunks of that book for this post. That really would be cheating! I've been creating characters for more than fifty years. My earliest ones were generally girls of about my age (then) or animals. The human characters tended to be fascinated by animals, fantasy, stories and country adventure, just as I was. I suppose most of them were offbeat, just as I was, and am. I never had any desire to write about immoral characters, or MCs who were cruel or nasty or unlawful or even disobedie...
Read more