Cozy is all over, right now. Everything is cozy. (I’m not complaining, but it’s interesting to see.)
Cozy is often called a genre, or a sub-genre, though it’s one which seems hard to define. There are a few common ideas:
- small scale conflict (or no conflicts at all)
- no violence on page; most bad stuff is in the backstory, if it exists at all
- strong connection to community, often showing as ‘found family’
- often there’s small commercialism, as well (coffee/tea shops, bookshops, etc)
- a soft depiction of every-day life
- usually, but not always, fantasy settings
- romance is common, but not universal
These things aren’t universal, though they are common. However, there are cozy horror books and cozy mysteries (this, oddly, is an actual genre, with genre expectations, genre tropes, and a huge backlist), cozy LitRPG (people are magically transported to a different world and sell bubble tea) and cozy ‘dark romance’ (which is apparently, dark romance but with active consent and lower stakes).
What I think is that cozy isn’t a genre.
It’s a VIBE.
(I’m beginning to hate the word ‘vibe’. It’s so mushy and indefinable.)
Cozy means: softer than usual. Cozy means: warm teacups and fluffy blankets, even if you’re trapped in a cage by a mean vampire. Cozy means: nothing specific except what the author – and the reader – want it to.
I’ve discussed this with several writer’s groups and a couple reader’s groups and there is no one single descriptor except the one we have for porn: I know it when I see it. (This is extra funny to me, as some people insist that cozy means ‘no sex on the page’ and others insist that cozy can include ‘explicit sex on the page’. Another tick-mark in the ‘vibes’ column.)
In the cozy fantasy subreddit, there’s a lot of discussion about whether this book or that is ‘really cozy’. Some readers don’t consider T. Kingfisher books like What Moves the Dead to be cozy, but others insist they are. (Bearing in mind, T. Kingfisher herself doesn’t consider it to be cozy. She’s said she thinks it’s horror.) There’s absolutely no consensus about what defines ‘cozy’ as it relates to fiction.
Hence: viiiiibezzzz. Not an actual genre.
Genres are definable, distinct, and come with a set of tropes, expectations, and requirements. (Horror is scary, romance must have a Happy Ever After, post-apocalyptic fiction includes some sort of large-scale disaster, spy novels have betrayal and secrets.) All of these things are pretty much required for a book to be included in those genres.
There are, of course, books with more than one genre, but each will usually have a genre which is the ‘larger one’. (If the setting is a fantasy world, it’s a fantasy spy novel, for example.)
What this means, for a writer, is that we have to suss out what we think is cozy, and how we want to write that. This will vary according to each writer. I’m working on a book series with an extremely over-powered (but unwilling) necromancer. I intend for the series to be (relatively) cozy.
I’m an outliner (now-a-days, this is called a Planner, as opposed to a Pantser – someone who just dives into the writing and washes up at the end of every writing session with more words and possibly a story that isn’t going where they expected), and as I write the outlines for this series, it’s interesting to me that the cozy elements aren’t showing up in the outline. They’ll be in the writing, but since they’re vibes – they’re how the story is expressed, not necessarily what happens in the barest bones of the story – they’re invisible at the initial outline level.
I’m keeping an eye on the Vibe, though, just to see where it goes and whether it coalesces into something more specific and … well. Measurable.