*For values of “always” that equal “often enough so as to make the exceptions insignificant.”

But then, I learned long ago that I think differently than most people (even most other writers). I don’t think visually. For instance, if most people** were to write a scene describing a forest glade in the middle of the night, with the faint silver of the moonlight reflecting off the rain-damp leaves, as a wolf climbs slowly up the grass-covered heal in the glade’s center, they would get there by first ENVISIONING the scene in their mind, like a picture or a live event, and then describing it.

**Or so I’m given to understand.

I don’t work that way. In my mind, the description appears AS a description–in words. If I want to actually see it, I have to force myself to do so, and even then I can’t always do it. I’ve read, and even written, entire novels without a single scene actually appearing to me in any visual sense.

There are writers whose story ideas are so consistently commercial and on-target in a particular genre that this determines without pause what genre they always write in. (I think it also makes it difficult for them to understand or recognize that many writers do NOT get idea that are born already perfectly-tailored to a particular genre or commercial niche.)

At the other end of the spectrum are writers whose ideas virtually never fit any sort of genre or niche, and their careers typically thrive or die on the basis of whether they can find an editor who believes in their work enough to publish it anyhow, and then manage to build an audience. (Gabaldon’s bestselling OUTLANDER series is an example of where this worked. The publisher and the author have long maintained that the series is not really -any- genre or like anything else, and readers have argued for years about what genre the series is or isn’t.)

In my case, I mostly get story ideas that don’t inherently belong to a particular genre, and I massage them until they fit (or until -I- imagine they fit) into something definable in market terms. This works much better for me in fantasy, where I have a good sensibility for the genre, than it did in romance, where it did not (and so I left the genre after staggering awkwardly through fourteen romance sales).

That’s one of the things I find fascinating about people- we all think that whatever is our ‘norm’ is the norm for everyone. If that is all you know then it must be normal

Here’s a follow-up question for you- Do your ideas come to you already in a genre? For example, if you are a Romance author, are your ideas Romantic, or could your ideas instead become a Thriller?

Is it nature or nurture that determines your genre as a writer?