IWSG: Writing in a Genre Outside My Usual One

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) blog hop! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. Today I’m going to just limit my post to answering the optional question of the month. I was busy all weekend writing my own post for A Far Out Fantastic Site and was doing it up to the very Monday I had been trying to post on a weekly basis. However, as I said a while back, I’ve had to ease off of the weekly blog posts and just post every other week or so. In addition to that, I have to also be more flexible of when I post because shooting for Mondays would cause me to have to stay up until 3 AM on early Sunday mornings and so it had been causing me to lose sleep during the week and to stress out. So, the post will not always come out on a Monday, and it won’t always be every week but possibly every two weeks. I discuss it more in my own post for this week where you'll also see a review of a Marion Zimmer Bradley novel!

So, here’s the question for the month. . . 

July 2 question - Is there a genre you haven't tried writing in yet that you really want to try? If so, do you plan on trying it?

I’ve always enjoyed reading adventure fiction but haven't really written it yet. When I say "adventure fiction", I don't mean just any genre that happens to involve a lot of action and suspense. It seems like that's what Amazon's algorithms in  searches seem to interpret adventure fiction being. If you do a search using the term, the results are going to be other genres such as science fiction (which I write regularly) and medieval or sword and sorcery fantasy simply because many works within these genres offer plenty of high action scenes.

No, when I say "adventure fiction", I mean fiction that falls outside of the speculative fiction genres and gives a more realistic telling of the protagonist’s event. In adventure fiction, a hero (or even an anti-hero) is on some sort of journey or mission and has to overcome physical challenges that are rooted in the mundane world. "Raiders of the Lost Ark" may have some supernatural events and even a tinge of science fiction in it (after all, archaologists, who are scientists of a sort, have not found the lost ark of the old Testament yet). However, the majority of its events take place on the mundane level and so at the level where they can occur in reality and in the present or past although they're a big improbability for most of us (and for many of us, that's probably a good thing). The majority of Indiana Jones’ challenges are mortal humans or animals such as angry, violent Nazis and venomous snakes. They are the forces of man and nature rather than supernature that he has to go up against. That is the kind of fiction I'm talking about when I say, adventure fiction. 

Some adventure fiction may not be as exotic or exaggerated as in the Indiana Jones films. For instance, many of Jack London's short stories and novels deal with adventurous situations that are more likely to happen to any of us if we are in a situation we're not prepared for such as finding our way through an arctic environment and having to survive it with the limited supplies we have on us such as matches for producing warmth and food for energising ourselves. 

I may have written adventure fiction when I was a kid at some point, but I don't remember. Since I started writing seriously, I have not written an adventure fiction story since writing is so hard and my time has often been so limited, that I have to put my concentration on my two favourite genres of all time--science fiction and horror. However, I read a lot of adventure fiction and I would like to take a short break from writing science fiction and horror and write adventure fiction. I probably will do that someday. 

What genre outside your usual one would you like to write in?

Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts:  Rebecca Douglass, Natalie Aguirre, Cathrina Constantine, and Louise Barbour! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels! 

Until next time . . .