The Case for Genre Hopping in Fiction

There are ways to succeed if you approach the switching effectively

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

I’m strongly against advice that tells anyone they can’t do something if they want to be successful. I believe it’s possible to do anything if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and do some hard work. Hell, that’s why I went from being an IT management graduate to a softball coach to a media marketer to an author. That’s why I’m such a big proponent of teaching people it’s possible to find success as a self-published author without spending a fortune.

What an author should and shouldn’t write rests entirely up to the writer. The genre is also completely up to said author, and while there are a ton of articles out there arguing against genre hopping in fiction, there is definitely a way to do it without completely alienating your current audience.

Writing multiple genres gives you tons of ideas

As a prolific writer myself, I love the ability to pull from millions of different ideas and stories. If I’m not feeling capable of digging into my romantic emotions, I’ll blow stuff up with superpowers or a massive space ship. If I’m tired of the endless expanse of space, I’ll drop down to Earth and write a NA romance or fantasy story based in a town I know. There’s an endless source of ideas just ready to take me where my mood swings.

This is useful as an author with ADHD. I get incredibly obsessed with a certain story or idea and I almost overwhelm myself with getting it done. By the end of it, I never want to touch that genre again (jk, I’ll get another swing of ideas in a month). The longest I stuck with a single genre was 6 books, where I wrote a high fantasy serial for three months straight with no interruptions. I paused in the middle to switch to YA fantasy for NaNoWriMo, and I’m already itching to get back to the four book high fantasy conclusion.

You expose yourself to different techniques

Locking yourself into a single genre isn’t a pitfall, however it does create some little speed bumps down the road. I’ve been working with a fellow author who writes sword and sorcery, high fantasy. He has been writing this genre for… longer than…