Genres and writing rules

I recently did an Instagram Live with my best feedback friend (as our writing group, Quill and Cup calls critique partners), Catie O’Neill.

Catie’s novel Love and Other Alien Concepts (out today! Order here) is both sci-fi and romance. She has taken the best bits from both, added some spice, to create a unique and fantastic story. In our Instagram Live, we talked about this genre blurring and writing rules.

Rick Moody has said, “Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. It helps people know what section to browse.” I think this is a really helpful way to understand genre – it is a shelving and marketing problem. Of course, there are genre expectations that a writer should be familiar with. Especially, the romance genre where expectations are more clearly articulated and adhered to. I tend to think though that there are solutions to where to shelf a book: a good search engine, knowledgeable staff, displays etc. Marketing genre-blurring novels can definitely be more challenging but, again, there are solutions. Catie has excellent tips on how to use Instagram to find your readers which helps with marketing.

The Vancouver Writers Festival is currently taking place. Interestingly, it has an event for an award for blurred genres: the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award. This award “named in honour of Betsy Warland, this award celebrates work that disrupts convention about what a book should be, how it should read, what it should sound like, what subject matter is acceptable.” Past receipts of this award have come from Indigenous or ethnic minorities who found that to tell their stories, they needed to challenge Western genres, and other writing rules.

This echoes what Matthew Salesses says in his book, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. He notes that,

“What rules and archetypes standardize are models that are easily generalizable to accepted cultural preferences. What doesn’t fit the model is othered“ (p.18). These writing rules are “made by culture and reflect culture” (p.29).

He provides loads of examples about the way plot, plot structure, understandings of causation, and centring conflict are all cultural and “represents the dominance of a specific cultural tradition.”

Reading this thrilled my anthropologist heart. I frequently find absolute rules about story structure annoying. When someone says stories have to be a certain way because that is how they have always been, I do wonder if that is true across all cultures and all history. As Matthew Salesses demonstrates with examples from Chinese, Korean and Japanese literatures, there are differences in how stories are told.

I find this very liberating. If it serves your story, blur the genres. If it serves your story, consider an alternative structure. Be creative! Experiment! I can’t wait to read those types of stories!