Posted: April 9, 2024
With fiction and other methods of storytelling, genre is used for classification. Genre takes such things like literature, film, or music, and based on the similarities in form, style, or subject matter, separates them into categories.
With genre as a whole, it’s quite simple to separate Fantasy from Mystery, Thriller from Romance. Most people know this well enough. But what of subgenre? There is so much content in the world that artistic pieces are further divided, and this is where it becomes muddled. The Fantasy genre alone has more than fifty different subgenres within it. Dystopia, a genre in its own right, is closely tied to Science Fiction, as they typically go along hand in hand—a future world in ruins, and thus with future technology or fictitious scientific advancement.
As you can see, Fantasy can be split into many different classifications. Some can even be combined with one another, such as YA Romantic Paranormal Fantasy.
Romance is easier to separate, because while many non-Romance genre novels include some sort of romantic attachment, a Romance novel is classified by its plot, which always centres around the progression of the relationship. That being said, Romance is a secondary genre, and will commonly come second in classification. The primary genre would be that describing the world—General Romance (meaning the present world), Paranormal romance (involving supernatural creatures of some kind), Historical romance (set at a specific point in the past), Regency romance (set in the regency period).
It can also be used in pairing with other genres, more as a descriptor: Romantic Comedy, Romantic Fantasy, Romantic Thriller. In these genres, the key essentials are more important; comedies have humor, fantasy has imaginary/unreal elements, thrillers have suspense/excitement. Two of these elicit specific emotions in the audience, while Fantasy is one of the largest and broadest main genres.
If you want to be a successful writer, you should know what your book’s genre and subgenres are. It’s not vital in writing the story, per se, but having a book that’s certain in its origins leaves a lot more room for uncertainty within the story itself. It’s a matter of not confusing your readers to a point of aggravation, but rather intrigue. If they know what they’re getting into, the writer is more likely to appear like they know what they’re doing, so the reader’s impression is that something is a clever tie-in, or has been thought through, rather than a plot hole or something due to lack of research/planning.
It’s a small task, but a big one, and I highly recommend nailing it down before you begin writing—or even just focusing on while you’re editing, so you can tighten the story and communicate the message.
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What is an Outline? [writing]
What is Character Building? [writing]
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