Genres and Darker Tones

I had a bit of a struggle when making the query letter for The Wilderness. The story’s main character is Cain from The Bible, so I figured that the it would fall under the “religion” genre. Looking at the literary agents who represent religious works, they generally want something softer without blood, gore, sex and violence. The Wilderness starts with Cain killing his brother, Abel, in the beginning of the story, and it also contains sex and a good amount of violence. It also takes place in various environments with some pretty fantastical characters, so I decided that this would better be suited under the Adult Fantasy genre.

I have a propensity to lean towards writing things that are a bit darker in tone. Even with The Mustard Prince, the villain’s backstory is pretty dark, and I’m not exactly kind to the main character. I actually have a very hard time writing happy endings to my stories. That’s not to say that I haven’t written a generally happy and good-natured story here and there, and The Mustard Prince is generally a light-hearted story, but I seem to lean towards putting some sort of darker tones here and there as well. 

I plan to watch a couple movies sometime soon like The Spy Gone North, which is a Korean movie, Crazy Rich Asians and maybe The Night is Short, Walk on Girl. I like the variety with international, animated, and mainstream as it’s always good to see different stories in various types of media.