You Are A Genre Writer
Lesson from "Story" by Robert McKee
No one writes in a vacuum.
We’re all genre writers.
Throughout time, storytellers have spun story into an astonishing diversity of patterns. To make sense of this outpouring, various systems have been devised to sort stories according to shared elements, classifying them by genre.
Genre - A system of classifying stories by shared elements.
The audience is already a genre expert. It enters each story armed with a complex set of anticipations learned through a lifetime of reading.
We must not only fulfill audience anticipations, but must lead their expectations to fresh, unexpected moments, or risk boring them.
Each writer’s homework is first to identify his genre, then research its governing practices. And there’s no escaping these tasks.
The choice of genre sharply determines and limits what’s possible within a story, as its design must envision the audience’s knowledge and anticipations.
Genre Conventions - Specific settings, roles, events, and values that define individual genres and their sub-genres.
Example: In Comedy, nobody gets hurt. The audience must feel that no matter how characters bounce off walls, no matter how they scream and write under the whips of life, it doesn’t really hurt.
You must not only respect but master your genre and its conventions. Never assume that because you’ve seen films in your genre you know it.
To anticipate the anticipations of the audience, you must master your genre and its conventions.
How to study Genre:
List all the works you feel are like yours, both successes and failures.
(The study of failures is illuminating… and humbling)
Purchase the works.
Study the works. Break down each into elements of setting, role, event, and value.
Reflect on all of these analyses together.
“What do the stories in my genre always do? What are its conventions of time, place, character, and action?”
Until you discover answers, the audience will always be ahead of you.
Genre conventions do not inhibit creativity, they inspire it. The challenge is to keep convention but avoid cliché. Genre convention is a Creative Limitation that forces the writer’s imagination to rise to the occasion.
This was a lesson from Story by Robert McKee.
If you want to pick up your own copy of the book, click here.
Or explore the C.S.M. Fiction archive.
