Picking Your Novel's Genre Identity
5 reason why knowing where your book will go in a bookstore is important.
Congratulations. You’re writing your first novel. You have taken a Neil Armstrong-sized prolific step by putting pen to paper. Eh, printer ink to paper.
Before one begins writing a novel, he/she must decide on several important factors. For instance, answer this oft-dreaded question:
What is your genre?
“Zipppppp.”
Insert audio of a turn-table needle sliding across a vinyl record.
5 reasons why knowing your genre is important.
Knowing your genre helps:
Give clarity to your writing
Make a promise to your readers, even before the title
Give potential agents an idea of where your book fits in a bookstore
You tell the right story: obligatory scenes & genre conventions
Identify the characters your story needs
What’s your genre? This calls for a one-word answer.
If you don’t know the answer to this question, how do you even know what to write?
The clarity in writing.
Writing with clarity lowers the odds of including confusing scenes in your story. One has a better idea of the characters’ literary destination. A writer better understands the antagonists’ and protagonists’ roles in the story.
What a reader might see as gray while reading, things are as clear as black and white to the writer.
Yogi Berra once said, “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there.”
Many learn the hard way by zeroing in on the clarity from their Franklin-Covey training. Clarity comes from beginning with “the end in mind.”
Have you ever discovered your genre after writing your first 100 pages? After 200 pages? After your first five drafts? This can happen.
A promise to your readers.
Last week, I took a five-day YouTube course called the First 1K Subscribers Challenge, offered by Las Vegas’ Think Media.
We learned that in the video world; the thumbnail is the first thing a person sees and decides their level of interest. If a thumbnail does not catch a person’s attention in 1.8 seconds, consider the opportunity lost.
But as @SeanCannell pointed out, a thumbnail makes a promise to a viewer. This is much the same way how saying a book is a love story makes a promise to readers.
If you promise a love story and then present something else, your viewers/readers will not be happy with you. Most likely, too, they won’t be back for a second chance.
You’ve broken your promise. In the writing world, this means they spent $26 on your novel expecting a story about animated four-leaf clovers in Ireland. Instead, you gave them a tome on the history of making meatloaf.
Can you see how that’s a problem?
Agents want to know where you think your book belongs in a bookstore.
This is something writers learn from talking to agents. Consider knowing your genre the first test in giving a pitch. If you cannot tell an agent where your book belongs in a bookstore, what are they to tell publishers?
Know your genre or your pitch will nosedive before you reach the excitement of what you’re doing.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve also heard the phrase: The publishing world is small. Word gets around quick.
Using this cheeky answer to “where does your book belong?” will get neither you nor your book far: “Why in the best-sellers section!”
You tell the right story; obligations & conventions
Every genre includes a unique pair of “obligatory scenes and conventions.” Without these elements, a story has no backbone. As Bob Dylan sang about being a rolling stone, one “with no direction home.”
A story must include certain elements or frustrated readers will say, “I don’t know where the f@#k this is going!”
If this happens, your book is not in a good place.
“What? It isn’t obvious? How can you not tell?” These are not acceptable answers. My favorite is, “I thought you could tell me.”
I’ve seen, heard, and given some of these answers myself, way too many times. Trust me, they sink you faster than a rock.
More about “obligatory scenes and conventions.”
Suppose you’re a YouTube foodie who specializes in how to make tasty, comfort meals.
Your thumbnail’s photo promises viewers will learn how to make beef lasagna.
Yum, right?
But then you list all your ingredients. Instead of including lasagna’s flat pasta, you instead call for spaghetti noodles. The recipe calls for adding a tub of ricotta cheese into a large bowl.
In showing how to cook the mean, you omit that, too. You cook up the sauce with bay leaves and minced garlic. It smells delicious!
Then you add a baked chicken breast served over a bed of spaghetti noodles and savory red sauce.
“Viola! Lasagna!” you announce.
But you’ve made parmesan chicken, not lasagna.
The same goes for genre writing.
You don’t have a “love story,” in a tale about Russian spies searching for a top-secret hard drive in Washington, D.C.
“But one spy falls for the American Congressman she’s marked,” you plead. “The spy even has a pages-long sex scene where the guy wakes to an empty bed in the morning! He was so into her. He’s ‘shook!’”
That’s not a love story
The story does not begin with two people bumping into each other and showing disgust for the other. The two maintain their dislike of the other for as long as possible and when it looks like they never will, they hook up. For a spell, everything is bliss.
With no genuine surprise, one of the two does something that appears as what it is not. A one-sided confrontation causes a breakup. The “accused” does not understand the misconception bugging the other. The big rift between them widens.
After receiving new information, the rejector realizes they have jumped to conclusions. They want the accused back in their life. Tearful apologies flood the scene. (It’s often raining in the background.)
But the accused says, “No! You cut out my heart and stomped that sucker flat! I’ve grown stronger. Wait until someone does what you did to me to you!”
In time, the first accused character realizes they’ve made the same misjudgments. The clock is ticking. One character realizes the other is about to board a plane to Kazfookistan to become a nun or monk.
At the (airport, apartment, train stop, bus stop) the other appears during final boarding. There’s always a reason they are late for boarding. The fleeing person is in line to board the transporter to their new sure-to-be unhappy life. They see the other person. There’s begging for mercy, forgiveness, and another chance.
“Darling, I’m co-dependent! My life will not go on without you!” the chaser says to the one leaving.
The one character drops his/her bags. Grabs the other person and they share a happily-ever-after kiss. For effect, the girl bends a knee and raises the leg behind her.
Bliss!
In the ending scene, one or the other reaches the goal set at the beginning of the story. There is love all around and in the background, Paul McCartney sings, Till There Was You! to solidify the message of the story.
The end credits now roll. The acknowledgment pages follow. Etc….
Identify the characters your story needs
This is an important element that genre drives. Consider an adventure story about hiking and camping in the mountains of the High Sierra. If you have a protagonist with no struggles or conflicts, then you have no story. But if the protagonist is racing against an antagonist to be the first one to climb an alternative route up El Capitan in Yosemite—that has conflict right away.
Throw in the need for the protagonist to prove something, and you have passion. Some kind of sub-genre even with a worldview of maturation.
Have a man and woman known for mountain climbing who can’t stand each other. She says he’s a phony, only into climbing for the money. He thinks she’s an arrogant, spoiled brat who doesn’t appreciate the sport.
When they reach 2,500 feet up the face, he warns her going a certain route is too dangerous. She decides she will prove him wrong. She falls, and he does the maneuver she taught him, the one where she saved him earlier. But this time, he improves her new technique for the better and she sees this saves her life. You have the structure for a love story.
Having the guy be a janitor from Boston doesn’t work well in the Sierras. Custodial staff is best for solving impossible mathematics equations on a hallway chalkboard.
Tess McGill from Staten Island, who has never seen a mountain, does not work in a story about the High Sierras. But she can use her street smarts to climb her way to the top of New York City’s skyscrapers.
A character’s talents and skills are incumbent on the genre.
When asked the genre question, what will you answer?
Don’t get caught in the glare of an agent’s pearl necklace.
You have the wrong idea about writing, and you are not ready for prime time if you can’t answer such a question. (There are so many nuances, I removed the word “simple” from in front of the word “question.”)
Fear not. You’re only 100, 200, or 300 pages into the work. There is still a chance to salvage a few of them.
Help is out there!
There is help for all writers in deciding the genre of your book.
Shawn Coyne eases making this decision via a flower-like chart of genres and sub-genres. Reading his materials helps. In my case, I also talked to a person in a free 30-minute consultation call that lasted 90. It took that much to get me on track.
My personal worldview shifted. I learned to stop forcing the square peg of a thriller into the round hole of an adventure story. I’m not making that up.
You can find it here on his website, StoryGrid.com.
Coyne’s guide helps writers find and understand their genre.
See the impact of not knowing your genre?
If you’ve finished the first draft and do not discern which genre you’re writing, you have work to do.
Search for what other editors and writers besides Coyne have shared.
In the comments below, tell me in which genre you’re writing. If you can’t answer with one word, please admit you have more work to do.
And for Heaven’s sake, do not send out a query letter with your completed first draft!
Dear Agent,
I finished the last chapter today of Gobble Degook Machinations, and I’m excited to send it to you. Even though this is my first draft, I am certain Hemingway was wrong when he said all first drafts are shit.
My writing is not like that. I have a completed manuscript! One I filed for copyright protection.
Like The Beatles sung in Paperback Writer, this book will be an instant classic. My mom and little sister said they loved it. Friends have said they will line up at bookstores for a signed copy.
I’m not even kidding. They say whenever it’s ready, they will be there!
I do not know for sure where this fits in a bookstore. The front counter or the best-seller section seems most likely. But that’s something for you to negotiate, right?
Sincerely,
N. G. Published
PS: In case you need my bank routing and account numbers, you will find the routing number woven into the text on page 529. The account number is the name of my protagonist cyborg. #05535555. Bet you’ve never seen a writer this clever, right?
PSS: When will you send my advance? Do you think I could get even half the money by the end of the month? The rent is due, and I am broke! You understand, right? I mean, don’t you deal with writers and queries like this all day?
Some solemn advice
If you don’t know where your WIP will belong on the shelves of a bookstore, you likely also think you’re ready to send query letters. Do not send one like the one above. Ever.
Do the world a favor, remove the word “query” from your vocabulary.
You are nowhere near needing to know its meaning.
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