I’ve changed how I think about genres
For years now I’ve been saying that genres are toolkits. You grab the tools you need to tell the story you want to tell. Maybe you need some screwdrivers from urban fantasy, maybe you need a lug wrench from space opera. As long as the story fits together and feels like one cohesive, logical universe, you’re all good. But in the course of promoting All the Birds in the Sky, I’ve been talking about genre a lot, and I’ve found myself thinking about it a totally different way. Now I’m thinking of genre as the skin, and the story is the bones, muscle, sinew.
In other words, the “genre” is what you see on the surface. It’s a story about vampires, so there’s blood and fangs and immortality and sunlight and maybe mind-control. It’s a story about spaceships, so there’s airlocks and vacuum and zero gravity and maneuvers and maybe space battles.
But that stuff is not the story. The story is all the stuff going on beneath the top layer, all of the events and all of the emotions and relationships that contribute to a narrative. Two people are friends, but one betrays the other. A young man and a young woman are both in love with the same old woman, and she doesn’t want either one of them. A man is taken captive and has to learn from his captors in order to escape from them. One country invades another. And so on and so on. And even those things are just the bones, where a lot of the story is in the sinew and the blood vessels.
The point is, you can tell a story about a rivalry on a spaceship or on a 17th century sailing ship, and it’ll change the story some – but not necessarily that much. (See: Star Trek and Star Wars both borrowing from World War II movies and just transplanting them to space.) When everything is working right, the genre elements actually give a shape and an added purpose to the stuff happening under the surface. You have an urban fantasy that is more thrilling, or makes more sense, because it’s urban fantasy as opposed to historical romance. It’s not a thing where you can put any skin on any body and it’ll work.
If anything, it’s the other way around – thinking of genre as skin has made me think of it as more essential and integral than when I was thinking of it as a toolkit. You can always make things work if you don’t have the exact right tool, but you would be pretty screwed without a skin.
Top image: Leprechaun in Space.
