We’ve spent the first few weeks of the year talking about the revision mindset: What is revision, exactly? How is it different from editing? What fears do writers have about it? What tools can you use to tackle it? Now we’re moving into big-picture issues that you should think through as you decide how to shape the perfect mess you have created.

I’m starting with genre because that’s often where writers start, by deciding I want to write a mystery or I want to write a historical novel. And it’s a topic that causes anxiety and confusion in many authors. Authors know the story they’ve written but don’t always understand how to match it up with what feels like a bewildering assortment of poorly defined categories. What is the difference between commercial, contemporary, up-market, and women’s fiction? Can a book be called urban fantasy if it takes place in a small town? Is my book grimdark or dark fantasy? Where does Young Adult end and New Adult begin? (All questions I’ve fielded from authors in the past year.)

Let’s demystify it a bit. When you boil it down, genre is just another word for category. We categorize books, like we categorize everything else, because that seems to be a human impulse, but more practically, we do it so that readers can easily find the kinds of books they like.

When messaging about genre goes awry, there can be problems. The controversy over American Dirt provides a useful warning about the pitfalls of writing outside of your own identity, but it’s also a lesson about what happens when you miscategorize a book. Most reviewers have agreed that the novel is successful from a plotting and pacing standpoint, and that if the author’s publisher had marketed the book as a thriller rather than as the “big book” of the season, there might not have been a problem. Laura Miller, writing in Slate, quotes a publishing executive’s diagnosis that American Dirt is “a commercial book that was mispositioned as literary.”

Another possible pitfall for writers is to violate a foundational convention of their genre. Romance readers, for example, might be satisfied with a happy-for-now ending rather than the conventional happy-ever-after, but are they going to respond well to your protagonist-burns-it-all-the-fuck-down ending? (I’m here for it though—send it straight to my inbox.) Will you have more creative freedom if you position your novel in a different genre?

If you are writing in a clearly defined genre or sub-genre, Google is your best tool for investigating conventions and reader expectations. Writers associations, like the Mystery Writers of America, often have helpful resources on their websites. Book bloggers and authors often post deep dives into their favorite niche sub-genres. Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid website also has a number of helpful resources, and many of the associated Editors Roundtable podcasts include useful discussions of specific genres.

However, I’d urge you to test these lists of genre expectations against recent successful novels in your genre. Remember, too, that conventions are always changing and evolving. It is often the authors who deliberately tweak or subvert genre expectations that break through and become widely popular or inaugurate a new sub-genre.

And that leads me to my next point: studying genre conventions can give you fresh inspiration for your own book. Rather than asking yourself what genre conventions your novel might be missing, flip that question around and ask yourself how genre conventions or tropes might liven up your manuscript. (This is especially true for writers of literary fiction.) If a genre convention doesn’t seem to fit easily into the landscape of your novel, spend some time exploring the gap. Sometimes it’s the gap itself that will show you the way to an exciting innovation that will thrill your readers.

Two of the writing craft books I reviewed last year—Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid and Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel—are helpful in this kind of work. Both use genre in two senses, first to discuss familiar categories like thrillers, horror, romance, fantasy; and second to discuss broader story types. One of Brody’s categories, for example, is what she calls “dude with a problem”: “An innocent, ordinary hero suddenly finds themselves in the midst of extraordinary circumstances and must rise to the challenge.” This story type can be found in multiple genre categories—for example, Andy Weir’s The Martian (hard sci-fi), Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (epic fantasy), and Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (YA).

Coyne goes even further, breaking story types into both external genres (Action, Crime, Society, Love, etc.) and internal genres (Status, Worldview, Morality). I like the notion of novels having both an external and an internal drama, but that’s a discussion that I think works best when applied to character. The risk of these kinds of categories is that you can easily get muddled, without much clear benefit. I’m not sure that laboriously labeling your work as, for example, a “Realistic, Long form, Arch-plot, Action, Adventure, Monster Drama” (Coyne’s description of Moby Dick) tells you much about it.

However, these categories can show you possible plot moves you might not have considered. If you are writing a dude-with-a-problem story, for example, have you included an “eye-of-the-storm moment” to allow the protagonist to reflect on the challenges she has already surmounted and those still ahead of her? Have you given her a friend or love interest who can support or counsel her at crucial moments? Do you see a fresh new way to present these tropes?

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