One day it’s definitely a memoir. The next, you’re convinced it should be a novel. By Friday, you’re wondering if the whole thing is actually a collection of essays. You’ve been flip-flopping for months (maybe years) and the genre confusion has left you completely frozen. You can’t finish writing your book because you don’t know what your book even is.

Here’s the thing: that uncertainty might not be the problem you think it is.

Flip Flop and Waffle: When You Can’t Decide What You’re Writing

You’ve been waffling between wanting your project to be an autofictional novel, a memoir, or a collection of essays with something of a novel’s structure. Genre is so loose these days that the confusion about deciding what it should be has left you frozen—unable to do anything on it.

Here’s a question worth sitting with: is “what do I call it” actually necessary to answer in order to finish?

It depends on what you mean by “finish.” You can call any draft finished. Any time you get to the end of a draft and say, “Okay, I wrote the book,” you’ve finished. There’s no real finishing in this game called writing.

You might never really be done with a piece if you’re the kind of writer who always returns to something and finds something else you want to be different. And that’s okay. Some writers never look back once a book is done—they close the file and move on, never wanting to revisit it. Others can’t stop tinkering. Neither approach is wrong.

Think of It Differently and Watch It Come Alive

So if the “what is it?” question has you paralyzed, here’s an approach that might shake something loose.

There’s a refusal to finish that’s sometimes really generative. Questions of genre—how you’re thinking about your draft—are fertile territory for reimagining what your existing work might become.

If your project was written as a memoir, try this: in your own brain, just think of it as a novel now. When you go back to that draft and revise, it will feel different. It will feel more alive. This works in either direction. If you have something that’s a novel and you think of it as an essay or memoir, it similarly feels alive just because the way you think about it is different.

What this reveals is important: ideas of stagnation and overworkedness—any quality judgment you make about a piece of writing—is pretty much only an effect of how you’re thinking about that piece. The manuscript hasn’t changed. Your lens has. And sometimes that’s all it takes to get unstuck.

This works at the sentence level too. You can slot things into third person when they were in first person, then slot them back into first person later. Switching into third and then switching back has a tangible effect on the prose. If you were to read the original first-person version and then the version after swapping back, you’d notice: it changes. The swap and the swap back leave their mark.

Any screen time you have with your piece, any exposure time, is going to enrich it in some way. Anything you ever do to your work is permanent—not because you can’t undo it technically, but because you’re investing more thought, more concept into the piece, and that’s going to show.

Genre Is a Lens, Not a Cage

All of which raises a question: if playing with genre can unlock your manuscript, why do we get so hung up on pinning it down in the first place?

The beautiful thing about genre is that it can be fluid. Trying to pin yourself into one category is essentially a marketing decision you’re making during the creative process. And here’s the truth: nobody cares about genre until you’re talking to agents or publishers. It actually doesn’t matter at all before then.

So give yourself the freedom to not commit the narrative to real life. Untether it from whatever actual sequence of events a memoir sometimes requires in your mind. Proceed as if it’s fiction to allow yourself to do whatever you want, so you don’t feel bound by the confines of nonfiction in order to complete it.

Genre is fluid. Your draft is alive. And nothing you do to your manuscript is ever wasted—every revision, every rethinking, every swap and swap back enriches the work. If you’re still frozen, still caught between memoir and novel, remember: you don’t have to figure it out alone. A book coach can help you see your work with fresh eyes and finally finish the book that’s been waiting.