Writing and Genre

10 Mar 2025 - Otto Vogel

I write fiction. I don’t plan on it ever being posted here since I mostly write under a different name, but I’ve been writing for basically my entire adult life. I also ended up thinking about writing, even taking a few courses in my undergrad in the Literature department. Not quite enough to make up a minor, but enough that I got a bit of formal training.

I started out in genre fiction, and I don’t think I’ll ever fully leave it. Something about writing “contemporary” or “historical” fiction feels boring to me. Part of what I love about writing is the worlds you can make, the fantastic places that pour out of the page and envelop you. So I read, and write, “science fiction” and “fantasy”. Or I read mystery – Sherlock Holmes was a favourite growing up – or I read contemporary superhero novels. There has to be something conceptual that catches me, questions of how things could be otherwise. I like genre fiction. But that causes a tension.

There was always a feeling lurking in the background. I didn’t notice it that much myself, it was mostly discussed. A sort of elitism in the academic world, where genre fiction was seen as lesser to the sort of novels I couldn’t stand. Stuck as I was to intro-level courses, I didn’t see much of it myself, but my friends made it clear that it was there. Now, looking back and thinking about writing, I think I get both where that sense of superiority of non-genre fiction comes from, and where it goes wrong.

I don’t read much stuff that comes out nowadays. I don’t have the money or the time to pay attention to small publishers, I don’t self-publish my own work, and I’m not even in super close contact with my old writing buddies. But I still get advertisements for books, and I will still duck into a bookstore to see what populates the shelves.

There is a formulaic nature to sections of fiction. This isn’t in itself a problem; people read for all sorts of reasons. My mother loves pulpy Harlequin romances, and they have guidelines about what should and shouldn’t be in each book. Now, those guidelines are pretty loose in a lot of cases, but they’re still there. My mother can pick up a book and know what it’s going to have in it. It’s easy reading after a long day, something to relax with. I don’t think she would enjoy an experimental novel in that context. Media we find comfortable has a place, and if that media is writing, I’m happy about that. And genre fiction can be like that. Writing for money is hard. I think only 1 in 10 authors can live off writing alone. And they tailor what they write for audiences. As far as I know, Amazon is still the biggest market for writing today, and that has an algorithm to appease. There’s a lot of reasons why your writing might become more formulaic, why it might tend towards known tropes, known paths for the plot to take, known inter-character dynamics.

This formulaic nature makes it difficult to say much of interest about a book, doesn’t it? If it is like every other book in Genre X, then you don’t have much to say. Instead, you use the book as a tool. You talk about how patriarchy, or economics, or queer identity shape the space around the book, how they influence the words on the page, how they helped write the book. The author vanishes in a puff of society. That’s not terribly interesting for someone analyzing a novel. The novel is a bourgeois art form after all. That’s not a value judgement, I like the novel. It’s just a statement of the history. And as part of that bourgeois history, the novel is presented as something emanating from a personage, the fabled author. He breaks the conventions, he forges a new literary identity, he speaks to the culture while not being constrained by it, he is a man against time, even when he happens to be a woman. The author discovers the interiority of the soul; something like science fiction or fantasy would just distract from what’s important, the raw interiority he has plumbed. Genre fiction is too… worldly, too childish, too feminine, too lower class, to do those things.

And so we’ve slipped. The formulaic elements of some genre fiction has tarred it all, has pushed “art” back up to the upper classes, has made it something that must fit a way of speaking about art to be accepted. The impulse starts in a distrust of formulaic elements and ends in rank classism, where only the most successful genre fiction reaches.

That distrust of formulaic elements is something I find myself agreeing with. Writing should be an adventure, I think. The process of writing is wrestling with words, trying to get the language you’ve been handed by hundreds of years of writers and speakers, full of cliche, convention, grammar, turn of phrase, reference, to say what you want it to say. To tell the stories you have. And I want readers to notice. I want my readers to see the choices I made when I avoid using “and” in a list. I want them to see the metaphors I chose, the words I invent or dredge up from the silt of history. I want readers to see more than the formula, more than the convention. And I worry sometimes that the bits of reader culture I see point towards readers being less attentive. That I will have readers who see the lesbian love story without seeing the care I put into the intimate, (hopefully) unique texture of this love story, how (hopefully) it weaves together with the missions they take, with the developments they face, with the traumas they encounter and heal from. While I respect the formulaic writer – writing is hard, and I cannot imagine writing with ‘guidelines’ like I see from Harlequin – I don’t want to be read like a formulaic writer.

So when I see books advertised with what look like AO3 tags¹ I find myself disparing a little. It feels like readers are being trained to seek out convention, being trained to read what is comfortable, being trained to talk about what they’re reading in terms of tropes. And I don’t want that. That feels like a profoundly impoverished way to be read. And here is where I get maybe a little pretentious, maybe I end up reaching a little. I’ll try to avoid terminology from Deleuze & Guattari, but no promises.

One thing that has happened as the internet has matured is the development of tagging. This makes things easier to find, and I definitely use it pretty regularly. It functions as a way to help us find what we want to find in a truly immense sea of options. If we want a sci-fi story centered on the military, a military scifi tag can be a real help. So, “content” is broken down² into tags to make it searchable. But, because we are shaped by the interfaces we use, we associate the pleasure we get from some media we enjoy with the tags attached, because when we want to find more of that pleasure we naturally use the tags to look for more. This isn’t anything wrong with us, this is a structure of the system. Then, as people identify more and more with enjoying the tags instead of the media, writers will be encouraged more and more to present their work through those tags. This might even happen pretty unevenly. Consider content warnings. Those are hopefully more often correctly applied than tags in general. And they have an innate sense of “special group taste”. You get a sense of being part of the club that enjoys this, who isn’t bothered by it. That can be addictive, both rightly and wrongly. Queer ballroom and drag culture both play on this, but so do racist and transphobic jokes. For good or ill, this way of forming a sense of enjoyment is strong. I think this can pull the “tag-ification” of media along faster. If a tag like “choking” or “the dog dies” becomes a site of enjoyment, tags like “found family” or “pining” can get a lot more traction as they mimic the marketing around darker things. The uneven deployment of the tags becomes a way for it to speed up.

All of this is potentially subject to empirical testing. I don’t have the time, skill or energy to do it myself, but I can think of what we’d want to test or look for. First, I would want to verify that content warnings have become more common in print writing. Together with that would be a rise in marketing using those content warnings. Then, lagging by a few months, we would see a rise in marketing books that rely upon similar structure but with more “vanilla” tags. It’s entirely possible that I’m seeing ghosts here, so I’d be really interested to see if what I’m seeing is real.

I suppose I ought to end this with some sort of “call to action” or some bullshit like that. I’ll just say, you ought to let yourself be surprised by books. Just go into a library and pick up one that looks good. Give it a read, see if you like it. Get out of your comfort zone a little, read something that you just know by reputation. Try a harder book, one that’s from another part of the world. Try African, South American, Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern literature. Try scifi if you read fantasy, try fantasy if you read scifi. Try something marketed towards women if you mostly read stuff marketed towards men, and try something marketed towards men if you mostly read things targeted towards women. Don’t let yourself be constrained by convention. And when you read, try to focus on what is unusual, audacious, clever or strange about the writing. Think about why the writer might have done the funny things they did. I don’t think I have much to say to other writers; I know you are all doing your best.

1. This is not to besmirch the wonderful world of fanfiction. Writing has many uses, as I keep saying. I know one friend who wrote Sonic fanfic, and seeing his joy and the confidence it gave him was wonderful. People start writing there. They grow and change as creators. They develop skills, learn what works and what doesn’t. If that means there’s a glut of weird pornography involving unrealistic anatomy, so what? Writing is good. ↩

2. In D&G terms, we would say it’s “deterritorialized”. We break apart the existing structure into a new structure that can be more easily used by another system. According to D&G, it’s the same thing that happens when you plow a field. You deterritorialize the meadow by removing the structure the existing plants had, so you can introduce new plants. ↩