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What is Realistic Fiction? Characteristics and Style
I was born to write speculative fiction, but spec editors don’t seem to share my readings of fate. After five years of trying to climb SFF mountain — short stories, novels, even nonfiction articles — I accepted my failures and moved on.
Where do you go after you’ve spent half a decade in the same spot? A coworker had once told me that I should try writing my own story instead of someone else’s, and I finally took it to heart. Thus was born The Remnant Pieces, a free online serial that pulled me into the world of realistic fiction.
What is realistic fiction?
“Realistic fiction” is an odd beast, a genre that isn’t really a genre. It’s a category that is at once straightforward and easy to misunderstand, and working in it requires a different sensibility than other genres, if only because the authors have to make their own rules.
Realistic fiction is a commonly used alternative to the industry term “mainstream realistic.” This is a broad catch-all category defined, as the term suggests, by what it’s not — neither literary nor speculative. Thus, realistic fiction is the literary sector’s miscellaneous category, and can potentially encompass a wide range of stories — from serious family drama to light-hearted character comedy to coming-of-age tales.
