: Would this story be classified as Adventure or Religious Fiction? A pious, benevolent, chaste, vegetarian Catholic monk from America in the 21st Century makes a road-trip to the West Coast from

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Remember, genre classification is largely marketing. It's a matter of your book reaching a certain, pre-identified audience. So the questions you want to ask are "Who will this book primarily appeal to?" and/or "Who is most likely to buy this book?" On the surface, this book seems best suited to a religious audience, and would probably be marketed that way. However, there are some additional considerations:

1) It's possible for a book with strong religious themes to appeal to a secular audience as part of a different genre, and be marketed that way. A good example is the Chronicles of Narnia, which is generally viewed as Children's fantasy despite also being Christian allegory. However, in this case, the book needs to both have strong appeal outside of the religious message, and to not be perceived as "preachy" by the secular audience.

2) The "religious" audience is actually marked not just by religion, but by a range of social, political and cultural values, views and markers of identity. So a book that has strong religious themes but doesn't match the rest of the standard market for that religion may have an uphill battle to find a publisher/audience. (I've experienced this myself. My own work typically has Christian themes, but isn't necessarily a cultural or philosophical fit for the conservative, white, evangelical audience that is the core of the Christian market in the United States. So I need to make sure it has at least some appeal to secular audiences in order to sell it.)

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I wouldn't worry about what its classification is. I would simply write the story you want to write (assuming this isn't a hypothetical question) and let other people worry about classifying it after the fact.

Unless there is some practical necessity that requires you to write a specific genre, the point of writing should be to express what you want to express.

Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is difficult to definitely fit into any one genre. I doubt that he worried too much about that when he wrote it.

Also, your description of the story might not be sufficient to determine anything. Although you describe lots of religious elements, you may not be describing that the book also involves hand-to-hand combat, overcoming a series of deadly traps, and solving many mysteries along the way.

(I doubt you would have failed to mention it if it did, but I'm just making an exaggerated point.)

With that additional bit of information, were it true, the fact that religious things also happen might be diminished in comparison, making it more difficult to absolutely pinpoint a genre. (Ellis Peters wrote a series of mystery books that involved a monk.)

Based purely on the description you gave, I would lean toward it being religious fiction. Although it would be more explicitly so if religious texts and their interpretations were also known to make up a significant part of the story.

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Every element you named is religious, so it's not even borderline.

Also, I'm concerned about your ending, that it might fall flat.

Think of it like a movie - you want people leaving the theatre feeling good.

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