GenresFiction
Women's Fiction
The lives of women, told from the inside.
Women's fiction is a bookshop category as much as a literary one, and it usually means a novel centred on the inner and outer lives of women, written so that those lives are the subject rather than the support for someone else's story. Friendship, work, motherhood, marriage, ambition, and the long argument between the life you planned and the one you are in all belong here. The reader is often hoping to feel accompanied.
It is a wide shelf, and it can be comic, sad, romantic, or politically angry. What it shouldn't be is a set of types. Write particular women, with particular constraints, and let them be selfish or difficult when the story needs it. A book that insists its heroine is likeable in every chapter is usually a book that doesn't trust her. The tone can be warm. Warmth is not the same as pretending hard things are easy.
The kinds of book inside it
Book club
The novel gives a group of readers something to argue about, a decision or a secret, and it still has to work as a story for one person reading alone.
Friendship
The relationship between friends is the plot, including the ways friends fail each other without stopping being necessary.
Mother & daughter
Two generations are watching each other misunderstand the same history, and both of them should get a fair hearing.
Midlife
The book takes seriously the years when a life is already built and somehow still not settled, which is a richer subject than panic about age.
When you want a first sketch, Storywell can draft a story summary in this vein. You are still the one who writes the book. Compose an idea.