I generally don’t concern myself with genre divisions as either a writer or a reader. When I’m looking for things to read, I want to spend my time with realistic characters inhabiting an immersive world—and, beyond that, I’m not too picky. I take the same approach when I’m writing. Whatever conventions and ideas fit a story are the ones that I’m going to use, even if that means pulling from multiple genres, or ending up somewhere in between them.

At least, until I get to the point that a story is finished and I’m trying to find a home for it. Then, the question of what genre it belongs to becomes more pressing. While there are a number of markets that accept any flavor of non-realistic fiction, others have a tighter focus on one genre or the other and I find myself forced to answer the question: just what do I call this weird thing that I’ve created?

I did a post a few weeks back exploring what people mean when they talk about genre. For many, the word “genre” is synonymous with speculative fiction (and, often, the specific subgenres of speculative fiction that focus on technology, magic, or plot over the language and characters).

The truth is, though, that genre is simply a synonym for category. Every story—or, for that matter, every written work—can be assigned at least one genre label. There are also quite a few realistic subgenres, if not quite the proliferation of them that exists on the speculative side. And, just like speculative genres, these realistic genres and subgenres have their own sets of tropes and conventions that writers can follow or subvert as it suits their stories’ needs.

You can think of speculative fiction as a kind of super-genre. Stories that live under this broad umbrella all deviate in some way from the laws and rules of everyday reality. That could mean they’re set in an entirely invented reality or in a world mostly like our own with a few minor tweaks, or anywhere in between.

The term speculative fiction was first coined by Robert Heinlein in the late 1940s, so it’s hardly a new concept. Its associations have shifted over the decades, though, from a term mostly syonymous with sci-fi to one that’s more fluid. In today’s parlance, speculative also includes fantasy and most horror, as well as stories that exist between the borders of these genres. It’s become an especially popular term among those who write settings or tropes from fantasy and sci-fi  in a literary style.

“What genre do you write?” On the surface that seems like a pretty straightforward question, but anyone who’s spent some time in the literary world knows it can get weirdly complicated—especially for those of us who write in the styles often shoehorned under “genre” (AKA anything that’s not literary realism).