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[ellijah-h]

What is Genre?

This question has recently been appearing in many of my English lessons and it’s hard to answer. It can be defined in many ways and has been in many different texts by many more experienced writers.

For the benefit of most likely no one - here’s my view on ‘What is Genre?”

Genre, as I see it, is a difficult thing to understand. It’s not just a setting or a certain theme the narrative follows, but a feeling. It’s the feeling you get when you read a book. The way it grabs you in and caters to your desires, filling each greedy want you produce without you once ever telling anyone. Sure, plot and setting link to building up your narrative to fit your decided genre: you would want a bright, cheerful setting for a romance or a dark, gloomy house with a lurking stormy cloud that just happens to flash lightning when the monster wants to be revealed for a horror. Crime has a budding detective with a tragic backstory while adventure has a main character that just so happens to be the person that is needed to complete a thousand-year-old prophecy.

No, I’m not saying all stories follow these quickly written forms, but most of them follow similar ideas. All these factors do link to fitting your book into a genre but, just like many tv shows with a side romance, things change. A crime can quickly become a horror, a comedy can blend with romance. So sticking with these tropes for one genre can make a book bland. It needs changes in genre and theme in the same way it needs plot twists.

So genre is less wheat happens in the book you just finished and more what feeling it has left you with afterwards. A good crime/mystery novel will grasp you right to the end as it drags you through unrelenting plot twists that make you question people morality and then right at the end it rewards you with the gift of everything being explained leaving the reader pleased. They finally got their answer and, like Sherlock Holmes, everything is wrapped up in time for a happy ending where justice is served and he can go on to focus on other crimes. The feeling you get when you finally get your answer and the emotions the book makes you feel is what a genre is.

A good romance will make your heart soar when the two main leads finally kiss, leaving a happy, almost bubbly aftertaste. A well-written comedy will make you laugh out loud while a horror should leave you chilled to the bone. The feeling and emotions you receive while reading the book are what makes or break the book. If you have no emotional connection with it the author has failed to make the book fit into the genre category. Hints of romance are in almost every book (you can never escape) so authors can do what they please when writing, they can add moments of humour to an otherwise terrifying book, as long as by the end they have successfully managed to make the reader associate their chosen genre to their book because of what they felt while reading it. They have succeeded.

Give your reader emotions to feel. Don’t tell them they have to feel a certain way, we all know people hate being told what to do, but gently guide them with hints inside your pages. Be nice to your reader, they are the ones buying your book and paying you.

- ellijah -