Dr. Dume ~ The Doctor is In

Once in a while I review my limits as far as writing goes.

I'd love to be able to write romance and erotica because those sell well. Good romance writers earn an awful lot of cash, but even middling ones can make a living. Those books have a huge and devoted reader base. Unfortunately I know little of romance and couldn't write a sex scene without making it sound contrived and silly. Romance and erotica are outside my limits.

Science fiction? I can do it, but being a scientist I get bogged down in details. It's hard to write a science fiction story without turning it into a report. Once in a while I'll get it right, but mostly I don't. Science fiction is inside my limits but not comfortably. I know science well. Perhaps too well.

Thriller and mystery are genres I don't understand at all. Surely every story must be thrilling in some degree, and must have an element of mystery? If you know how it's going to end there's no reason to read it. I won't be producing one of these because I don't know what the classification means. Therefore, thriller and mystery are outside my limits.

So is crime. Agatha Christie has that angle covered, in my view. I can't top Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. I'm still considering a few serial-killer ideas which will definitely not include another 'Jack the Ripper' expose. I wish people would stop trying to guess who he is because he won't leave my attic until they do. Crime is a 'maybe' if I can get a serial-killer story to work. It's outside the limit at the moment but only just.

At the moment my limits encompass paranormal and horror, with a little SF thrown in for a bit of a change. Within horror, I prefer the gore to be a little less obvious and more implied. Psychological horror is my favourite but I haven't quite shed the influence of Clive Barker. So once in a while, death comes a-knocking with knives and imagination. I try to keep the serious gore offstage because I don't want to be limited to an '18' rating on the books I write.

Main characters are usually male. That's not only because I'm a chauvinist, it's also because I don't write female characters well. I have no idea what happens inside women's heads and believe me, I've looked. Any female POV characters are guesswork and if I made a female principal character, sooner or later the guesswork would show through. I don't agree that 'men cannot write female characters'. I do agree that I'm not good at it.

I think it's a good idea to review my limits once in a while. It keeps me on track and stops me drifting into places I might not be able to cope with. It also lets me test those limits.

There might be a hole in the boundary somewhere. It's always worth looking.