I just spent a week in Tokyo teaching professors, post-docs, and PhD students how to write better papers for submission to STEM journals. There are a lot of rules to this, but also a certain mentality that’s changed over the years.

As recently as 20 years ago, authors strove to write dense prose that was hard to decipher. After all, if even experts can’t follow your paper, you must be a genius! This tradition goes back thousands of years, at least to the Greek mystery cults.

Fiction is (mostly) the opposite. If you’re writing a post-modernist novel, you’ll know how cryptic / experimental / avant-garde you want to make your work. I write (mostly) surrealism and magical realism, but I want it to be accessible.

This can make the work difficult to categorize. My protagonists are typically teenagers (so it’s YA!), the language is simple and voicey (so it’s MG!), but the themes are (I hope) both subtle and deep (so it’s literary!). Balancing all of those has taken me a while.

My most-recently finished book is at the point where I think any further shifts will rely on someone who has ideas about the market. My work-in-progress (they’re all in progress, of course, but the newest one…) is leaning more toward literary, but there are dragons and fairies and talking cats, so….

I admire authors who write genre fiction. I love reading it. I just can’t seem to make myself write it. The magical always slips in to the ordinary, and the ordinary always slips into the magical.

I figure if I’m going to make things difficult on readers trying to category it, the least I can do is make the language straightforward. How do you choose your style?