Why Genre Awareness is Crucial for Effective Writing
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As a book coach, I’m finding the importance of sharing content writers need to hear this time of year: goal setting, practical steps to develop a story, how to stick with writing after the energy of the new year wears off, and today’s craft focus will be in the same vein.
Today, I want to talk about genres and why it’s important to learn about your primary content genre before you start writing.
Know Your Genre to Plan and Write Your Novel, Not Just Market It.
The writing industry puts a lot of focus on the importance of a writer identifying their genre once the book has been written to determine where it will fit in the marketplace, but minimal emphasis on identifying genre before you begin to write it.
This is a problem because a book’s genre is much more than which shelf it sits on in a bookstore.
If you understand the primary content genre of the story you want to tell, you’ll instantly have a blueprint to guide your novel.
Not only does genre determine market placement, but it also creates your story’s backbone by informing the theme, setting, characters, conflict, plot, and tone.
Knowing your primary content genre will allow you to:
Identify what your protagonist wants and needs.
Map your characters’ journey and the global change that will result.
Understand the main force of antagonism and how it can pressure your protagonist to force change.
Know the key scenes that your readers expect to see.
Understand the overarching message or theme the story will convey.
What is a content genre? How can understanding it help us craft stronger stories?
Genre is a way to group things (in our case, books) into categories based on their similarities, such as style, content, subject, or age level appropriateness. Stated like that, it sounds simple enough, but if it were simple, then why does picking a genre feel so damn hard for so many of us?
Fiction has two big umbrella genres: literary and commercial, also known as genre fiction.
Today, our focus is on commercial fiction.
The Two Genres of Commercial Fiction
The Marketing Genre:
This is the genre type we most commonly think of and what most “how to find your genre” writing advice targets.
It informs the direction we take when we walk into a bookstore or the selection we make from the dropdown menu in our browsers: Contemporary, Romance, Fantasy, Historical, Mystery, Suspense, Sci-Fi, Young Adult, Middle Grade, and on and on.
Now, some of those marketing genres will give us an idea of what the story is about, like romance or mystery, but most don’t.
When you go to the fantasy section, you have no idea what type of journey the main character will embark on, only that they’ll do it in a fantasy setting. If you like fantasy, so you read the jacket copy, which gives you an indication of what the story is actually about, and you decide from there to purchase or pass.
The Content Genre:
This is the genre writers need to focus on when planning, drafting, or revising their novels.
The content genre is the story’s guts, the journey the characters take between page one and the end. It’s the “what happens” and the “how do we get there” part. If you understand your content genre and its rules (yes, I said rules), you will have a blueprint for what should happen in your novel and when.
A note about genre rules, also called conventions and obligatory scenes: these are what readers expect when they come to your type of story. If you ignore the rules, your readers will be confused and dissatisfied, and probably won’t know why.
Genre Conventions & Obligatory Scenes: The Rules of Writing Good Fiction
Conventions:
Conventions are the elements that signify the type of story you are telling.
If your genre is a romance, readers expect two people, sometimes more, to find each other, resist love, fall in love, be challenged, get ripped apart, and finally come together for a HEA or HFN.
If the story is a murder mystery, readers expect there to be a dead body and a detective (of some sort) who puts together clues to unmask the killer by the end.
If it’s an action-adventure story where the hero is out to win the day, the reader expects to see the hero face terrible trials, overcome a powerful foe, and come within a hair’s breadth of death before saving the day.
Conventions create expectations for our audience.
Obligatory Scenes:
Obligatory scenes are the moments of action the story must include (and, for the most part, the order by which they should be introduced) to satisfy the expectations set up by the conventions of the novel.
An obligatory scene in a romance is the Meet Cute: the moment the lovers first meet. Romance readers are watching for that moment from page one, expecting it early. Don’t disappoint.
In murder mysteries, readers will expect a scene at the end of the book where the criminal gets his due and justice is served. Can you imagine how angry a mystery reader will be if they get to the end and don’t see the murderer caught and punished?
An action-adventure story will always have a moment where the hero is on the brink of death (physical or metaphorical) at the villain’s mercy. This is the climax. The moment our action-adventure fan has been reading for, the one the author has been teasing them about and priming them for! They are dying to see how the hero will outsmart and escape the villain.
Conventions and Obligations are Not a Formula:
Please don’t mistake this for formulaic and, therefore, not worthy of your attention.
This is story form and structure.
Think of it like masterful neuroarchitecture played out on the page.
It works because humans are wired to be satisfied by a particular sequence of events that elevate our pulses. The writer’s job is to understand this architecture and make it fresh.
How to Identify Your Content Genre
Here are two of my favorite resources to help you identify your story’s content genre:
Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody (she has another book out specific for YA genres now, too).
The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne.
Both are fantastic and have the same ideology; they just present it differently.
SAVE THE CAT WRITES A NOVEL STORY GENRES:
Save the Cat Writes a Novel says there are only ten story genres! That’s right, ten!
Here they are pulled right off pages 81-82 of Save the Cat Writes a Novel:
Whydunit: A mystery must be solved by a hero (who may or may not be a detective) during which something shocking is revealed about the dark side of human nature.
Rites of Passage: A hero must endure the pain and torment brought about by life’s common challenges (death, separation, loss, divorce, addiction, coming of age, and so on.)
Institutionalized: A hero enters or is already entrenched inside a certain group, institution, establishment, or family and must make a choice to join, escape, or destroy it.
Superhero: An extraordinary hero finds themselves in an ordinary world and must come to terms with being special or destined for greatness.
Dude with a Problem: An innocent, ordinary hero suddenly finds themselves in the midst of extraordinary circumstances and must rise to the challenge.
Fool Triumphant: An underestimated, underdog hero is pitted against some kind of “establishment” and proves a hidden worth to society.
Buddy Love: A hero is transformed by meeting someone else, including (but not limited to) love stories, friendship stories, and pet stories.
Out of the Bottle: An ordinary hero is temporarily “touched by magic,” usually involving a wish fulfilled or a curse bestowed, and the hero learns an important lesson about appreciating and making the most of reality.
Golden Fleece: A hero (or group) goes on a “road trip” of some type (even if there’s no actual road) in search of one thing and winds up discovering something else—themselves.
Monster in the House: A hero (or group of heroes) must overcome some kind of monster (supernatural or not) in some kind of enclosed setting (or limited circumstances), and someone is usually responsible for bringing the monster into being.
If you pick up Save the Cat Writes a Novel and flip to the explanations for each of these story types, you’ll find the “required ingredients” listed (i.e., conventions and obligatory scenes) and a host of novel examples to help you better understand the genre.
STORY GRID CONTENT GENRES:
Story Grid takes a different approach, separating content genres or story types by their main forces of antagonism.
External Content Genres
External Content Genres are driven by a force of antagonism outside of the character, say a villain, a natural disaster, a war, or a person who drives them up the wall, but they eventually fall for each other (When Harry Met Sally, anyone?).
I don’t like to say they are more “plot-driven” vs. “character-driven,” but the plot events are big and bold to the readers.
These stories tend to have linear timelines, are more consistent with reality, have clear cause and effect, and have a closed ending. What your protagonist wants on the surface is dictated by the external content genre of the story.
Examples: In an action story, they want to beat the villain; in mystery, they want to solve the crime; in performance, they want to beat their opponents.
Internal Content Genres
Internal Content Genres are driven by an internal force of antagonism. It comes from within the protagonist, perhaps manifesting as their self-doubts, biases, or a crippling and painful past.
The plot events of these stories are less flashy and more nuanced, so they are more character-driven. These stories can be more open-ended, but they don’t have to be, and the protagonist is driven by their subconscious desires more than their conscious ones.
A novel can be driven by an external content genre, an internal content genre, or both, but one of those is going to be primary.
External Content Genres as told by Shawn Coyne and The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know, with examples of well-known stories.
Action- Indiana Jones, Die Hard, Gladiator, Star Wars
Horror- Cabin In the Woods, Friday the 13th, Bird Cage, IT
Crime- Murder on the Orient Express, The Godfather, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Ocean’s Eleven
Western- Tombstone, 1883, Yellowstone, Lonesome Dove
War- Braveheart, Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, Inglourious Basterds, The Patriot, The Hunt for Red October
Thriller- Silence of the Lambs, Gone Girl, Seven, Black Swan, Shutter Island, Girl on the Train
Society/Social Dramas- The Help, Dead Poets Society, Animal Farm, 1984
Love- When Harry Met Sally, The Notebook, Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, Outlander, Bridges of Madison County
Performance- Rudy, Rocky, Erin Brockovich, Cinderella Man, Eight Mile
Internal Content Genres and Examples
Status- Erin Brockovich, Little Miss Sunshine, Rocky
Worldview- Good Will Hunting, Pixar’s Turning Red, The Breakfast Club, Fight Club, To Kill a Mockingbird
Morality- The Grinch, The Devil’s Advocate, Casablanca
Side note: Each of these genres can be broken down into subgenres. Story Grid’s website is an excellent reference for deep diving into each genre to learn more about its components.
How to Find Your Primary Content Genre:
Start by exploring the premise of your story. Read more on how to craft a strong story premise here.
Exploring the premise of your story forces you to focus on the five key elements a story must have: Setting, Character, Plot, Conflict, and Theme, and from that, imagine a main character with a beginning desire and conflict that keeps them from getting what they want.
So ask yourself:
Who is your main character?
What’s the big problem they are facing?
What’s the plan to solve the problem?
How will the issue escalate as they try to solve it, and how will the character change as a result?
What major message or takeaway does the story speak to?
Consider those questions, then look to the content genres we’ve discussed to see what best fits your story!
From there, you can consider the conventions and obligatory moments your story needs to begin to plot or discovery write with more confidence!
That is how knowing your content genre will help you shape your story and write one that satisfies your readers!
Can your book fall into more than one content genre category?
You bet. But as the Highlander says, “there can be only one” primary content genre for your book, that is. It’s the one that supports the story’s spine. And this is where a lot of writers struggle, myself included.
For example, say you’re trying to write a mystery with horror elements and an action-heavy plot that is almost a thriller, but your protagonist’s inner struggle is also a huge source of antagonism, and there’s a status battle on the line.
Those make the best books, but they’re tricky to write.
Pro Tip: Decide which content genre will better produce the change you desire in your protagonist and the global situation (which will answer the story’s main question) and determine how excited you are about writing significant plot events the reader can see.
If you’re more excited about the plot events, consider making an external content genre the front runner and use the external force of the story to pressure the character to undergo undesired internal growth or unintended downfall depending on the arc you have in mind for them.
Moral of the story:
Know your story’s content genre! It will help you shape your protagonist, their desires, the story’s plot events, and significant sources of antagonism! Stay true to your genre conventions and obligations, add in your twists of freshness and originality, and you’ll write a story that will satisfy your readers!
