A Reflection on Genre as a Tool for Writers

Depending on who is talking in an English department, the concept of genre can take on a variety of meanings. To the literary scholars present, it represents a historical and sometimes fixed concept that only the greatest writers can bend. 

To the creative writers in the department, genre means specific markets for writing. There are poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers, with many subgenres to play with. And there is plenty of playfulness to be found in all categories, even mixing and bending. 

Talk to the composition person in the department, and the idea moves yet again. Genre becomes a tool of invention because writers are often thinking about their genre as they write. And genre is fixed and raises certain expectations for what will be said and done, including guiding ideas about style. But as with the creative writers, genre will also be a certain way for the writer to bend, mix, and change.

Here's the thing. All three spokespersons are accurate. But all reflect different ideas about genre, which in the commercial marketplace can be seen as consisting of romance, science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, detection, and action adventure. Each has its subcategories--for example, there can be historical romance, high fantasy, or cozy mystery. For this piece, I would like to say just a few things more from the perspective of the writer, particularly the religious writer, simply because genre always does raise expectations and what seem to be boundaries. 

Genre Sells

First, of course, for writers, there is the market place. Genre helps editors and booksellers sell their books. Genre helps to categorize books, set up different sections of bookstores and libraries, and promote new works on websites. Editors also know that readers base their buying behavior on their love or dislike for certain genres. Lovers of mystery go back again and again to find the same writers and pleasures, and buy new writers on the basis of recommendations from established writers. People also avoid works on the basis of genre--I have friends who will never read science fiction, for example, while I personally find horror to be manipulative and usually will not even attend a film in that genre. Get Out has been the one exception, partly because I don't think that film is pure horror. It certainly is not supernatural horror. 

Thinking as a composition person, I think that for writers, genre is double-edged. It can be an organizing, even creative principle. Or it can be limiting. Talking to editors for the first time for me was a rude awakening. I was presenting my book, Apocalpyse TV, for their consideration, and their first question had to do with what genre it was. And while both the editor and I were thinking about potential readers, my ideas didn't excite them. I was thinking "literary," by which I meant "playful, even satirical." But the editors all heard, dull, obscure, and few readers or sales. What they wanted was a quick category they could use, not challenges to be overcome. My conversations with them didn't last very long. 

Genres Bend

 No genre is ever really static. Even the old epic poem has had its innovators. When John Milton came to write Paradise Lost, his epic poem, in the 17th century, he did more to bend the genre, partly because he wanted to write a Christian epic, if that were possible, rather than something broodingly pagan. The old heroes, whether the adolescent, offended Achilles, or the wily Odysseus, weren't going to fit his view. Some have said the same for Shakespeare's Hamlet. How, after all, does a playwright in Elizabethan England write a "Christian" revenge tragedy (The original genre for the Hamlet material was cast as a Spanish Revenge Tragedy)? 

Both poets drew on the fixed elements of genre. Milton began by inviting the muses. And he engaged in the idea of the hero of the epic. And yet both also played with those elements. Though many romantic poets saw Satan as Milton's hero, other more recent critics have argued that Milton used Satan to subvert the old hero of the epic. In his poem, the hero of a Christian epic may be many people, or it remains unclear. 

Genre as a Tool of Invention

Genre is like that for writers. When I began writing my novel, I was thinking of my favorite writers, most of whom would be classified as literary. I wasn't thinking of writing in one genre. As a Christian writer, I was especially driven by a desire to challenge Evangelical thinking and identity. I wanted to think about how people of faith grope toward some firmer, more authentic faith than the one they started with. 

I wanted to write a religious, even a Christian novel, but I didn't mean by it the kind that is found today in the marketplace, with there being one point of view espoused, one where feeling subverts thinking, and one person or group is saved at the end and joins a church. I was thinking about faith as a questioning faith. That was my idea of my genre. 

At the root of the word "question" is the word "quest." The question for many--this also ties into questions about genre--is where we can truly have both faith and an ongoing quest together. Most of the time, I don't think we think this way. In the same way that marriage is seen as the culmination of a romance story--at least that's how I read all of the Jane Austen novels, where marriage is the happy ending--faith in God, when found, is seen as the culmination of the quest and the ending of the Christian novel. We wish to support the happy ending, the idea that apocalypse, or revelation, comes at the end of every movie or story. They world changes forever into a fixed happiness we find in serving God. 

What I have found, however, is that while I am happy believing in God, the world has rarely changed, even temporarily, for the better. Instead, the world merely absorbs new trends in a jaded way. And many classic Christian writers have noticed this. To them, faith might be seen as a new beginning to new adventures, to new questions and concerns. But no one is dead yet. 

This is how I saw my novel. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end to it. But there are also new quests to be made--perhaps none as important as finding faith. But they are tied to the idea of finding and moving on. 

In this, I am working on a new genre of the novel. My hope is that new ways of thinking call out new genres from old ones. 

I am calling my new genre the "pre-apocalyptic novel." And I am only half in jest. 

I would value your response to this. 

Thank you for reading.