Genre is More Often a Marketing Concern Than a Story One

If you go into any bookstore you find pretty rigidly segmented shelves and sections for genre. Sometimes you'll see two genres sharing space (fantasy and sci-fi tend to be bunkmates in this way), but even then all it usually takes is a glance at the cover art to know which genre label is getting slapped onto which book.

Libraries are also quite fond of this specificity of category.

While genre can be a useful tool, I think it's worth reminding people that it's still pretty new in terms of fiction. Hell, sci-fi didn't even exist as a concept until the fairly recent past (a lot of folks credit Mary Shelley and her infamous Frankenstein for birthing the genre in the first place), and less than a hundred years ago you still had fiction magazines referring to sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and other mixed genres simply as weird fiction.

So if you're getting all caught up in what genre your story is or isn't, just remember that genre is a lot like gender roles. It's real, in the sense that we made it real, but it can be ignored if the existing system of labels simply doesn't conform to the tale you want to tell.

Genre-Fluidity in Writing

At its core, genre is a classification system. However, it's often been used to pare down and define genre fiction for the purposes of marketing and sales, rather than out of some purer, ideological devotion to providing a tool for understanding storytelling themes and tropes. That's more of a side effect.

What kind of book is it? Ummm... well...

The issue a lot of writers run into is when they start using genre to control what is allowed in their stories, rather than to help define those stories using widely-understood themes and terms. Whether it's automatically assuming that fantasy stories must have a pseudo-European Middle Ages flair to them, assigning any book with a romantic subplot to the romance category, or flatly stating that ax-wielding barbarians cannot get in fights with sentry robots while confronting alien beings from beyond the stars because it's an unholy union of too many genres, this sort of mental block often trips up a lot of creators.

This is sort of like guys who won't wear certain colors because it's "not manly," or women who worry about whether cutting their hair a certain way means they aren't feminine enough. Because if it makes you happy, then you should rock whatever style you want, regardless of the "rules" society expects you to follow (spoken or unspoken) have to say about it.

Another way genre purity is like rigid gender roles? Most of the assumptions and rules are a lot newer than we think, and have zero resemblance to earlier norms.

For example, as recently as the 1920s pink was considered a masculine color (something changed over the ensuing decades via Freud and others). High-heeled shoes were originally invented for men, and let's not even get started on powdered wigs, and the other bits of fashion favored during that era. Everything from dresses, to elaborate hair styles, to beard grooming that we would now consider "feminine" have had strong masculine connotations in the past. Hell, even makeup was used pretty widely between genders until the mid-1800s when it was declared a women's only product.

What does that have to do with writing rules and genre conventions? Everything. Because looking at what genre was and wasn't over a long timelines shows that a lot of our classifications are simply made up to suit the tastes of organizations, editors, and publications who shape the business of fiction. Sort of like how "psychological thriller" exists because the academy didn't want the horror movie Silence of The Lambs to win best picture, so they had to make up a whole new category to shunt it into. When you realize that there are no rules except the rules you choose to use, it can be a very freeing experience when it comes to shaking off the boundaries of your stories.

So with that in mind, and in the spirit of all things weird and unclassified, get strange with your stories! Write dwarves that have French accents and specialize in swashbuckling! Create starships driven by fairy dust! Write vampire private eyes who still go to museums to catch up on what was going on when they were young! There are no limits except those which you impose yourself!

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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