Still playing catch-up, squiders! We’re doing May this week.
May’s prompt: What genre scares you the most?
So much interpretation on the prompts this year. Oh well! This one I’m going to say means what genre scares you the most to write. Like, what sounds like the hardest.
There are many genres that I don’t have any interest in writing. They’re not necessarily “scary” per se, just not interesting.
But ones that are actually scary…hmmm.
Romance is scary on some levels. I always worry that it’s coming across as silly, or that I’m not properly explaining things in a realistic manner. I mean, I’ve never had complaints, but maybe it’s only a matter of time.
Mystery is scary. I love mysteries, but they seem very hard to write. You’ve got to have enough possibilities in play that your reader can’t predict what’s going to happen, and you’ve got to know exactly how everything went down without accidentally foreshadowing things too early.
I wrote a cozy mystery a few years ago for Nanowrimo, if you’ll remember. I was pretty pleased with it–a good first try, in my opinion–but it definitely has issues. A little light in the second half on twists and whatnot. I’d love to fix it (this goes back to last week, when in my perfect year I’d be getting stories revised faster) but it’s a couple stories back on the queue.
Hmmm. Not sure anything else I write or would like to write is “scary,” in my mind.
Is that arrogant? Maybe. But part of writing is because it’s fun, and to explore things, and to try new things. If it’s scary–too scary–then what’s the point?
