by Crawford Kilian
``Genre'' simply means a kind of literature (usually fiction) dealing
with a particular topic, setting, or issue. Even so-called
``mainstream'' fiction has its genres: the coming-of-age story, for
example. In the last few decades, genre in North America has come to
mean types of fiction that are commercially successful because they
are predictable treatments of familiar material: the Regency romance,
the hard-boiled detective novel, the space opera. Some readers,
writers and critics dismiss such fiction precisely because of its
predictability, and they're often right to do so. But even the
humblest hackwork requires a certain level of craft, and that means
you must understand your genre's conventions if you are going to
succeed--and especially if you are going to convey your message by
tinkering with those conventions. For our purposes, a ``convention''
is an understanding between writer and reader about certain details of
the story. For example, we don't need to know the history of the
Mexican-American War to understand why a youth from Ohio is punching
cattle in Texas in 1871. We don't need to understand the post-Einstein
physics that permits faster-than-light travel and the establishment of
interstellar empires. And we agree that the heroine of a Regency
romance should be heterosexual, unmarried, and unlikely to solve her
problems through learning karate.
As a novice writer, you should understand your genre's conventions
consciously, not just as things you take for granted that help make a
good yarn. In this, you're like an apprentice cook who can't just
uncritically love the taste of tomato soup; you have to know what
ingredients make it taste that way, and use them with some
calculation.
So it might be useful for you, in one of your letters to yourself
about your novel, to write out your own understanding and
appreciation of the form you're working in. I found this was
especially helpful with a couple of my early books, which fell into
the genre of the natural-disaster thriller. Your genre analysis
doesn't have to be in essay form; it just has to identify the key
elements of the genre as you understand them, and that in turn should
lead to ideas about how to tinker with the genre's conventions. And
that, in turn, should make your story more interesting than a
slavish imitation of your favorite author.
As an example, here are my Own views about the thriller:
- The thriller portrays persons confronting problems they can't
solve by recourse to established institutions and agencies; calling
911, or a psychiatrist, won't help matters in the slightest.
- The problems not only threaten the characters' physical and
mental safety, they threaten to bring down the society they live in:
their families, their communities, their nations. This is what is at
stake in the story, and should appear as soon as possible.
- The solution to the characters' problems usually involves some
degree of violence, illegality, technical expertise, and dramatic
action, but not more than we can plausibly expect from people of the
kind we have chosen to portray.
- The political thriller portrays characters who must go
outside their society if they are to save it, and the characters
therefore acquire a certain ironic quality. They must be at least as
skilled and ruthless as their adversaries, yet motivated by values we
can understand and admire even if we don't share them.
- The disaster thriller portrays characters who are either
isolated from their society or who risk such isolation if they
fail. That is, either they will die or their society will fall (or
both) if they do not accomplish their goals. In the novel of
natural disaster, the disaster comes early and the issue is
who will survive and how. In the novel of man-made disaster,
the issue is how (or whether) the characters will prevent the
disaster.
- The characters must be highly plausible and complex; where they
seem grotesque or two-dimensional, we must give some valid reason for
these qualities. They must have adequate motives for the extreme and
risky actions they take, and they must respond to events with
plausible human reactions. Those reactions should spring from what we
know of the characters' personalities, and should throw new light on
those personalities.
- The protagonist's goal is to save or restore a threatened
society; it is rarely to create a whole new society. In this sense,
the thriller is usually politically conservative, though irony may
subvert that conservatism.
- At the outset the protagonist only reacts to events; at some
point, however, he or she embarks on the counterthrust, an attempt to
take charge and overcome circumstances.
- The progress of the protagonist is from ignorance to knowledge,
accomplished through a series of increasingly intense and important
conflicts. These lead to a climactic conflict and the resolution of
the story.
- With the climax the protagonist attains self-knowledge as well as
understanding of his or her circumstances (or at least we
attain such knowledge). This knowledge may well create a whole new
perspective on the story's events and the characters' values: A murder
may turn out to have been futile, or loyalty may have been betrayed.
We should prepare for these insights early in the novel, so that the
protagonist's change and development are logical and believable.
Except from "Advice on Novel Writing by Crawford Kilian."
About the Author
Crawford
Kilian was born in New York City in 1941. He moved to Canada in 1967
and now resides in Vancouver B.C. Crawford has had twelve science
fiction and fantasy novels published. He has been nominated for an
Aurora Award 3 times for his novels Eyas, Lifter and Rogue Emperor- A
Novel of the Chronoplane Wars. His latest contribution to SF is a
non-fiction book for would-be SF writers called Writing Science Fiction
and Fantasy. Crawford has two more novels in the works.
To learn more about him at Wikipedia.
Crawford Kilian Books at Amazon
