Genres

An amusing post at Writer Unboxed: The Final Word on Genre

This (short) post starts this way:

Here’s what we as writers need to understand about genre: it simultaneously does and does not matter.

Genre doesn’t matter while you’re writing, because the book is yours and yours alone. You shouldn’t have to think about how it will be received or what people will expect of it; it should be exclusively and fully yours, to mold like clay, as you make your vision a reality.

Except that genre does matter while you’re writing, because if you intend to write in a genre that has strong expectations associated with it, you need to respect and comply with those expectations. A thriller with no thrills? Cozy fantasy that culminates in an un-cozy bloodbath? A romance where the central couple doesn’t end up together? In the immortal words of Prince Humperdinck, “I would not say such things if I were you.”

And then the post alternates “doesn’t” and “does” for the rest of the post. That’s why it’s funny. Also, I think most of the points it’s making are good points, which is pretty impressive with this structure. I’ve personally seen a couple of people call stories “Romance” when they were not Romance because the couple didn’t end up together, so I agree that genre matters. Also, I agree that genre doesn’t matter. I nodded along to almost all the paragraphs in the linked post: yes, no, yes, no, yes it matters, no it doesn’t matter. As I say, this is entertaining.

Broad fiction genres, a review:

Can we list them off without missing any? Literary, Contemporary, SF, Horror, Fantasy, Romance, Mystery, Thriller, Historical, Western. Am I missing any? I think that’s the set, when it comes to really broad categories.

Here’s a related post: What Genre is my Book?

If you say you’re writing a book, someone is going to ask you what “kind” of book it is. One with words, you might say. … You probably know if you’re writing mystery or romance or fantasy or a picture book or diet book. Those are genres that are pretty easy to nail down. … You probably shouldn’t describe your book as a romantic romantic suspense mystery historical post-apocalyptic science fiction Only a person who likes ALL of those things will like your book. … You have your main genre. Then, I say and some disagree, you get up to TWO additional adjectives to describe your book. Maybe you’ve written a military thriller. Maybe you’ve written a Victorian historical romance. Maybe you’ve written a post-modern literary novel. 

All right, I can buy that: One main genre, with the others turned into qualifiers. The word “with” is also useful. “This is a dark fantasy with a strong romance” is different from “This is a fantasy romance with horror elements.”

Then breaking down all the subgenres is insanely difficult. Remember this Venn diagram I attempted? SF Subgenres: Venn Diagram. I was trying to define subgenres well enough to place Invictus and No Foreign Sky somewhere sensible. Designing a really accurate Venn diagram is basically impossible, but I was semi-happy with this attempt. Here, I’ll reproduce that Venn diagram below. I’m not maintaining that it’s perfect, remember.

See where I put Invictus? I’m trying to indicate that it’s primarily sociological SF, but also that it’s close enough to the military-SF boundary that the overlap is meaningful. The central concerns in Invictus (and Adamantine) aren’t “How do we fight this war?” so much as “How do these human societies work, why are they in conflict, what kinds of people do they produce, how can individuals acting within and between these societies prevent catastrophe and at what cost?” But military elements and impending war are substantial enough in this series that putting it near the boundary tells the reader something accurate and useful. That’s what I was trying to indicate, anyway!

But, wow, how would you even begin if you wanted to try to add Fantasy and Horror to this Venn diagram and thus create a giant “Speculative Fiction” diagram? I don’t think you could. It would get too complicated. High Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal, Romantasy, Dark Fantasy, Sword-and-Sorcery, Magical Realism, Fairy Tale, and the enormous but never defined category I think is parallel to Space Opera — Adventure Fantasy. How about Alternate History — does it belong here? How about Weird Western? And what is Tuyo, anyway? I’d call it Sociological Fantasy, which is never mentioned as a subgenre (as far as I can remember). I’m leaving “Epic” out because I think it’s a mischaracterization of scale for genre.

Then Horror. What’s in Horror? I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about this genre, except that it overlaps with Dark Fantasy. What is actually here in this genre? Gothic, Eldritch, what else? Is “Supernatural Horror” different from “Eldritch”? I would say yes. Ghost stories — is that its own subgenre? Slasher horror, maybe. Psychological horror, which intergrades with Contemporary, I suppose.

How would you handle all this? Maybe not as a Venn diagram, but a map. Giant continents: FANTASY, SF, HORROR with … peninsulas, maybe? Or landbridges, I guess. And then major subgenres are represented by big regions within continents, with broad and fuzzy borders. Grimdark is a bleak, harsh territory. Cozy fantasy is pleasant, like the Shire. Romantasy is aggressive, having recently invaded neighboring subgenres. Oh, and LitRPG is a recent arrival, conquering territory and establishing beachheads.

Meanwhile, Space Opera is a giant region in SF, with Military SF along one frontier and Sociological SF along another, and so forth. Golden Age Space Opera becomes an Old Kingdom inside modern Space Opera. Major plot elements such as time travel and psionics become rivers flowing through different regions. Post-Apocalyptic is, of course, a blasted wasteland somewhere — I suppose encroaching on SF and Horror, with a tiny bit of Fantasy involvement.

Has anybody ever put something like this together? Sort of! Here’s a Literature Map. Fantasy and SF are on the upper left. Oddly, and imo incorrectly, YA and children’s literature are represented by regions. I think marketing categories are absolutely irrelevant to genre and should not be represented this way. Maybe eventually, I’ll see what I can come up with — when I have either lots of free time or a major desire to procrastinate! The latter is a lot more likely than the former! But this would be fun to play with. I think I’d start with hex paper and a pencil before I even tried to do anything with a graphics program.