If You Love It, Let It Go.

My friend and fellow traveller in writing, Gitte Christensen, wrote a blogpost this week about what it can be like to be a writer of speculative fiction.

Maybe it's because I came to writing quite a bit later than most, but my experience has been a little different. I don't think I've ever made excuses for writing SF, or tried to fudge the genre too much.

There are a couple of reasons for this - the first being that I write across a couple of genres. My first published story, in a horror anthology, is not considered horror by many people. Most see it as a paranormal romance. I guess it doesn't matter how much the walls of pigeonholes are blurred (or completely bent) these days, speculative fiction is still considered speculative fiction. And I guess that's what I mostly write.

Yes, I've been caught in those conversations with people who declare they loved The Road, or Avatar, or The Matrix, and then tell you in the next breath they don't like watching SF. And yes, I spend time pointing out that SF is more than just robots and spaceships.

I'm almost certain I don't consider writing SF as an elite pastime. Within the SF community I've found both writers and fans to mostly be extremely inclusive and encouraging. Outside the community I've found most readers to find my work accessible. Whether they read it or not is another matter.

As a teacher at High School, teaching mainstream English and a writing course, I've generally found it to be evidence of credibility among my students. Of course teenagers don't have the same issues with genre that adults have.

It's about time we stepped off the back foot, stop being apologetic for what we love, and allow our genre to spread beyond the confines we often place around it.

Range.

Last week, while playing some music in the car, a friend asked me who I was listening to. I told them it was a Jimi Hendrix album, and they seemed surprised because it wasn't the raucous noise they'd expected from Hendrix.

I suspect this merely showed that my friend had never really listened to much Hendrix. But I also realised at that moment that like Hendrix, a writer needs to have range. It's important to have your own voice, but it's equally important to use that voice in different ways to keep your readers on their toes.

I've recently tried experimenting in my writing. Not only on 'subject', but in genre and style too. Not all these experiments have worked, but I've been rather pleased by some of the results. Some will be rewritten, some have been subbed out, at least one has already sold.

I consider myself to be a Sci-Fi writer, but when I look back over my writing I can already see a number of horror stories and a few urban fantasy pieces. And, having recently re-read some of them I can usually see where they originated and the influences contained there-in.

Jimi Hendrix only released three studio albums in his lifetime, but  his development and experimentation is clearly obvious to anyone who takes the time to listen to those works with a critical ear. When he died he had plans to move into new areas, recording with Miles Davis for example, and no one really knows where he would have gone had he survived.

Develop, experiment and have a range.  Those are my goals in writing.