Fantasy or Non-Fiction

Trying to determine genre can be a rather difficult process. How will you market your manuscript? Which agents should you approach? There are often elements of mystery in a literary work, and however would one classify Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife? Fantasy, sci-fi, literary, romance, all wrapped up in one story.

Even OJ is having a rough time trying to classify his book, no doubt preparing to peg its genre before sending it around to publishers in Europe. Is it fantasy or is it non-fiction, one might ask. The author claims that the book is a fantasy, although not quite in the realm of Lord of the Rings. No, it is a flight of fancy made up by the ghostwriter. Or maybe it was the publisher. Perhaps it was Judith Regan herself, creating the scenario out of thin air.

He didn't do it, OJ, didn't kill anyone and the jury of his peers said so. Therefore, anything written that claims to show how he did it must be a complete fabrication. The chapter that Newsweek has published, obtained from some unnamed source, is said to provide a blow-by-blow description of OJ's motivations, rage, and manner of murder. That, according to the former football player, is just so much blather. Why, it's nothing more than the hook that every author searches for to make the manuscript appealing to the reader.

In case you were wondering what OJ was doing with his free time, since the round of talk shows and interviews went the way of his pulped manuscript, it's clear that he's been reading writer-oriented blogs and forums. To know about hooks, he must have been making a study of the publishing industry, and what better way to increase his chances of getting published?

Sure, he could have corrected a few technical flaws in the manuscript, but why bother when it's just an exercise in creative writing for the ghostwriter. Anyone could have written the same thing, just by studying court documents and then fabricating this scenario based on the evidence. That's the foundation of historical fiction, right there.

Just as well that HarperCollins pulled the plug on the book. It saves the book dealers from having to figure out where to shelve the thing, to say nothing of librarians all across the country. There's nothing in the Dewey Decimal System about this peculiar dilemma.