So, you want to be a commercial genre fiction writer, huh?…and you’re just the best there ever was, right?
Well, you’re probably wrong.
Writing commercial fiction is first and foremost an art, and you have to have talent for any art, so you may actually have no talent for it or you’re only mediocre at it, but you won’t know until you try. If you truly think you can do it, then go for it. In spite of commercial genre fiction being an art, I believe that every single person on Earth has at least one great story in them.
Whatever the case, you’ll find out for yourself whether you can do it or not. However, there are some things you should know first:
1a: Don’t be pretentious!
I’m speaking from experience here. I’m sure you’ve heard the word “pretentious,” and you probably know its meaning, too. It means pretending to have knowledge, sophistication, or experience that you don’t have.
One of the most important things to understand as a writer, any kind of a writer, is that you’ll never stop learning. Please, listen to what other, more experienced writers have to say. You don’t necessarily have to follow what they say, but you should at least keep their advice in mind when you write.
1b: If you are unsure of something, look it up.
It took me a metaphorical forever to follow this rule. If you are unsure of something, regardless of how small that doubt may be, look it up. You’ll save yourself a headache later on.
This rule applies to everything:
Is the breed of horse for your outlaw important? How long can this horse go without water? Without water, will the horse collapse or just refuse to go anywhere? Will it wander wherever without control just looking for water? Look it up.
Can a speeding train smash through a concrete wall? What if the locomotive has a cowcatcher? How fast does the train need to be going? Will the front of the train cave in? Look it up.
What is the percentage of people who break up on Valentine’s Day? Did people actually write Dear John letters? Do people still write Dear John letters? What was the general reaction to the breakup? Look it up.
What is a conjunction? What is an adverb? What is a prepositional phrase? What in the star-strewn heck is a gerund? Look it up.
If I have the word too at the end of a sentence, do I need to put a comma before it? Well, it can be either. I omit commas to make an informal too, and I’ll put in a comma to emphasize the too. However, there’s no hard and fast rule here. Don’t believe me? Look it up.
When you don’t do the legwork, you get errors, and those errors are embarrassing later on. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience.
1c: Some examples:
The word arcane refers to knowledge that few others know of. In modern fiction, it most often refers to magic and sorcery. It does not mean old-fashioned or outdated. If you want that definition, the word archaic is the word you’re looking for. Archaic means seriously outdated, old-fashioned, not in style, practically medieval, etc. If you’re unsure of the definition of a word, just look it up online. It takes no time at all.
Sirens (the monster, not the alarm) originated from Greek mythology, and they make a special appearance in Homer’s Odyssey. They’re malicious bird-women that lure sailors to their deaths through their singing, thereby having unfortunate sailors crash their ships upon the rocks. Their island is surrounded by the bones of lost sailors. The original sirens are not, however, mermaids. The confusion is thought to have originated from the Middle Ages, and this is where the transition from bird to fish came into popular culture, so don’t be surprised if you actually see the bird version at some point.
You may have seen movies or TV where people are picking up bars of gold to steal or haul off. These people might be stacking them in the back of a truck or sneaking away with them in a bag. Well, a cubic foot of solid Au weighs a little over 547 kg, or a little over 1,206 lb. A one-kilo gold bar weighs one kilogram or a little over 2.2 lb. The gold bars you see in movies are closer to London Good Delivery bars, so they actually weigh 10.9 to 13.5 kg, or roughly 24 to 30 lb! Good luck getting very far with a lot of gold on your own. So, before you make this kind of scientific error, look it up first.
In other words, if you’re unsure of something, look it up!
1d: Practice, practice, practice!
This advice is one of the most important pieces of advice I will give you, and it’s the advice that almost every established author out there will give you as well: Write something!
You need to write every day if you want to be a writer, any kind of a writer, not just a genre fiction writer. It doesn’t matter what you write, but keep in mind that you’ll get better at writing whatever genre you’re writing every day, so you may want to branch out for variety and experience, or you may just want to focus on one genre. That depends on you.
1e: Begin with flash fiction, and then transition to short stories.
When just starting out, you should start with flash fiction. Flash fiction is generally up to 1,000 to 1,500 words, so start with something short like this. It’s true that AI can write flash fiction very well, and I suppose you could use AI to get an example of how you can write flash fiction, but remember, you need to write it yourself in order to get the practice in. In this way, you can then transition to short stories.
Short stories, believe it or not, are the bare bones of a novel or novella. Such short sections in a book are called “chapters,” and they are, in essence, linking short stories. Each chapter is a short story in itself, so it makes sense to hone your skills in genre fiction with short stories. Stick to the basics, and the advanced techniques will come later on.
My first book was over a thousand pages long, and boy do I wish I’d reserved that one for the future. I made a ton of mistakes along the way and spent years of my life correcting them. Don’t do that. Stick with the short story first. You’ll have the skills to write novels after you’ve gotten the short-story form down pat.
1f: Don’t talk the talk. Walk the walk.
You don’t know how many people I’ve run into that have told me “I’m writing a book.” No, they’re not. They’re thinking of writing a book, but the odds are they’re never going to write it.
You can’t just tell people your idea for a book. You’ve actually got to start putting your idea into words on a screen or on paper. Sit down and write something. Start out with something and go from there, but just do it. You have to put your idea into the written word so that others can envision it, and walking around daydreaming about it doesn’t actually get anything done.
Now, if you blog, and you probably do, you should avoid writing genre fiction in the informal blogging style you’re used to. However, if you have trouble writing in a professional manner, go ahead and start your story the way you’re used to writing. You can polish it later. The main thing is to actually write something, and more importantly, get used to writing every day.
I have written hundreds of stories, and not all of them were works of art. In fact, some of them were pretty terrible. However, I earned experience from writing them, and you’ll earn experience, too. All you have to do is write something.
You’ll get faster and faster at writing the more you do it. Your quality will dramatically improve, and as long as you do the legwork, you’ll fix your grammatical and punctuation errors as well, but we’ll get to editing and proofreading later.
1g: One last thing: Go for it.
The default rule is and always will be: Go for it.
In spite of what I may have said about how writing genre fiction is an art that requires talent, don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do it. You have to make that discovery on your own. The world is full of people who will purposefully try to keep you down by telling you that you have no talent, so put some cotton in your ears. You’ve got some fiction to write anyway.
To be fair, you’ll find out on your own whether or not you can write. Don’t let someone else stand in the way of your dreams.
Also, if you choose a specific genre to write in, don’t be swayed by others wanting you to get out of that genre. Write what you want to write. If you like romance, write romance. If you like science fiction, write science fiction. If you’re old school and like realistic fiction, then write that. Write what you want to write.
Now me? I can write any genre, and I can kind of explain how to do that, but I’ll get to that later. That’s something that’s learned over a long time. It takes experience, talent, and skill to be able to pull that off, but if you think you can do it, the default rule is and always will be: Go for it.
The Quick and Easy Guide to Writing Genre Fiction Copyright 1st ed. © 2022 Matthew L. Marlott
TQ&EGtWGF: Chapter 1…Humility and Practice Copyright © 2026 bloodytwine.com Matthew L. Marlott
The image for Chapter 1 of TQ&EGtWGF was generated by artificial intelligence courtesy of OpenAI.
