What Genre is Unique for your ‘Voice?’ by Beth Kery

I’ve heard that given your unique writer’s voice that certain genres will work for you better than others. You might have the perfect voice for a paranormal or suspense but a rotten one for chick lit or even a contemporary. As a relatively new writer, I’m still not only trying to figure out where my voice fits best, but also trying to pin down what, precisely, my voice even is.

I recognize other author’s voices instinctively—the tone, the vocabulary they tend to use, the shadows of their unique life experiences, even the nuances of their personalities. Some writer’s have such a distinctive voice you would know them without seeing the cover (From my own personal experience I think of Sandra Brown, Neil Gaiman or Sarah McCarty, to name a few off the top of my head.) I try to picture Sandra Brown writing a fantasy/sci-fi or Neil Gaiman writing a category romance novel. Uh uh. No way. First of all, I’m going to take a wild guess and say neither author wants to write in those genres. But does your preference for genre directly relate to your voice?

So far, I’ve written contemporaries, paranormals and historicals. I’ve done both erotic and ‘steamy’ romance. I started out wanting to write paranormals, maybe because they’re what I like to read the most. I discovered along the way that I love writing contemporaries, however, even though I didn’t expect that I would. Something about writing real people with real emotions fits with my writing style better than I thought it would.

I contracted with Berkley Sensation for contemporary novels and just recently got another contract with Berkley Heat to do a couple paranormals, so I suspect I’ll have something more to say about it in the future. In the meantime, I’m just wandering along my writer’s path, gawking at the amazing, unexpected sites like a girl from corn country on her first trip to the city and learning as I go along. It does make me wonder, though, what other writers think about the matter. How did you choose the genre(s) you write? Do you think a ‘good’ writer should be able to cross genres, regardless of writer voice?



Beth Kery
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