This is the first of a few essays about genre. Before I really get into them, I wanted to have a dig around what genre is, and what it isn’t, and just play with some ideas before we get too crunchy on some of the deeper stuff, later.

Nothing I write is drawn from deep wellsprings of knowledge, and this one is particularly frothy, so if you hate it, well, I don’t care. I mostly made it up.

First things first: genres exist as a way of selling our stuff. As a reader, I know I like a particular genre, and so I will use it as a filter in Amazon or as an aisle to visit in the bookshop. As a publisher I like the shorthand it gives me to describe things like breakdowns of sales or predictions of growth. We all get it.

The problem is, of course, genres are not terribly useful to actually describe the contents of the book. Which is a surprise, given they are the cornerstone of the industry. They leak into each other, and people argue about them, and it all gets quite angry. And so, their use as a sales tool is limited, and their use as a way of designing a new book is very limited.

I am here to enhance your calm and encourage you to see why this is an interesting problem and where the gaps are, because those gaps might be a fun place to write a book (but also a place which will make it hard to sell to an agent or publisher, I guess). I came at this when I started trying to define fantasy, so this will have a bent towards my part of the world, but I will try and cover as much ground as I can.

So the first thing we’re going to do is lay down some rules. And these rules are precise names for things which don’t have very precise definitions. We’ll just use them here, when we’re done we can all walk away and forget them like a bad dream, but bear with me.

First: ‘setting.’ I’m going to use this to describe the wider universe the book is set in. This is a location and a time. This can be as mundane as ‘Sheffield, yesterday’ or it can be as exotic as ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.’ It includes some other subtleties that we’ll get to later.

Second: ‘timbre.’ This is the general tone of the book. I called it timbre because why not, I don’t know the actual term.

Third: ‘plot arc.’ Here I mean the broad structure of the plot, the big inflection points in the story. I think there will be around three to ten ‘plot points’ in a book. These are pivotal moments for the story. Your traditional three act structure would presumably have three plot points.

Then lastly there’s the tone of the writing, which I’m going to call ‘writing style.’ Don’t get it confused with timbre. That’s very different: timbre is about the underlying mood of the story. Writing style is the narrative voice.

Still with me? Great.

Now what’s fascinating about genres is that the all have implications for some of the above features. But none of them have implications for all of them. And understanding the expectations layered on a genre is actually a fun exercise.

So, let’s start with my part of the world, which is spec fic. Fantasy and science fiction fans have expectations around setting, and not much else. So that means you can do what you want with all the rest, and it’s still in that genre. It can be scary or funny, tense or cozy, whatever; but you can’t have a fantasy story set in a strictly accurate setting in the past, because that’s historical fiction. There needs to be something which softens that accuracy to make it fantastic.

Some settings are even more niche: a medical drama has to be set in a hospital or similar. Military fiction is set in wars. You can think of others, I’m sure.

So let’s run an exercise, and say that we’re writing a fantasy book.

Next! Horror has no expectations about setting. Horror controls my second factor: timbre, or the general mood of the story. That is, horrible things will happen, mostly to people. Now, there are lots of different types of horror, I agree, and if you’ve ever read a really good compilation (The Books of Blood blew my mind when I was young, I have no idea if that’s aged well) you’ll know that there are supernatural elements and realistic elements and massive cosmic dread and very personal terror. But… It’s the fact that it’s scary is what binds the genre together, right? So the timbre is constant and everything else can move. Other timbre genres: thrillers are fast-paced and action filled. Cozy is warm and snug and, well, cozy. Absurd comedy is light-hearted and strange. (I hesitate to use the word ‘zany’ because come now we are not savages.) You can obviously mix and match timbres in a single book, but you have to be careful, otherwise your book feels a bit confused. Things tend to have a primary timbre with secondary elements, or maybe change gradually over the story.

So, our book is now a fantasy horror, and that’s completely fine. We have a setting genre and a timbre genre.

Now, mystery and romance. These both have constraints around plot arc. The mystery book must have, well, a mystery. It has a set up, and an investigation, a discovery, and a denouement. You can mess around a bit with it, but it’s that intellectual thrill that you chase, and that is metered out by the big arc of the book. Likewise, think of the well-documented romance plot arc, which can have some extra wrinkles, but is essentially the meet-cute, the getting together, the split, the reconciliation. Now, there are all sorts of mystery stories: cozy, gritty, strange, funny. There are also all sorts of romance stories, too, but they share a structure. These genres require the a set of plot beats, and don’t actually have any other constraints. There are of course other plot genres: the road trip, the heist, the escape.

Let’s build up our book some more. It’s a fantasy horror romance, because in theory these genres don’t tread on each other’s toes.

Now, let’s talk about writing style, the narrative voice of the book.

This is harder, and the one that I will confess I bodged in because I saw a huge hole in my scheme: that is, whether it’s funny or not.

Comedy can feed timbre: often funny books are absurd or jolly, but neither of those things need to be true; there are humorous works of fiction set in absolutely bleak dystopian worlds, like The Office. And think of all the genres above and add ‘comedy’ and yes, of course it exists. Comedy horror, comedy fantasy, comedy thrillers… So, yeah, as I said, I bodged it in. Perhaps we can put literary fiction at the other end of this spectrum: a narrative voice which is trying very hard to be serious. I don’t know, I’m allergic to literature.

So we’re here: we’re going to write a fantasy horror romance comedy. Or maybe a medical thriller heist. Or a science-fiction cozy road trip. Wait, that last one is The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet! Dang, Becky Chambers got there first.

The point of this exercise is to think about the bones of a genre, and see which ones fit together and which ones are incompatible. Next we’ll talk about some of the features of those genres.

Goodbye till then. Oh, and better get cracking with the first draft of that book, eh?

Genres

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