The Lure of Genre

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Wednesday, November 23, 2005
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I've written in the past about the genre stigma, but now I'd like to say a few words about its lure. In graduate school, I was taught to see the conventions of genre as a crutch, and it's easy to despise a crutch when you've got two good legs. But when you're limping along through a story, as I am at the moment, a cruth starts looking like a very good thing indeed.

What genre provides is a set of structures and expectations, along with certain set pieces. When you write a mystery, the genre hands over some costumes and scenery: you get a crime scene, an interrogation room, a morgue. You also get a cast of supporting characters: hard-drinking detectives with marital woes; ironic, wise-cracking coroners; more villains than you can shake a stick at. You don't have to use all or any of them, but when you hit a rough spot in your tale and aren't sure where to go next, they're always waiting in the wings to help out.

The genre answers questions. It provides form. What the sonnet is for poets, the genre can be for a novelist. It tells you what scenes are needed and oftentimes gives you a rough idea of what your ending needs to include. In the service of an unimaginative writer, genre fiction can be as bad as any rhyming verse. But its structures and strictures also offer freedom to the imaginative writer -- which must be one of the reasons for genre's appeal.