Getting a Plot Together - Part 1: Knowing Your Genre

- Part 1: Knowing your genre

by Sherry-Anne Jacobs

Exactly how you put a plot together, as I said in the first article, depends on your own approach to writing. You may want to make a start by simply picturing the main characters and situation. This may be something as simple as I used for QUEST * (see end of article for details if you're interested) the first book in my four-part fantasy saga, ie the title idea - a quest. On the other hand, you may want to get the whole story shaped and detailed, with characters clearly visualised before you write it 'properly'.

Whichever approach you use, you'll need to know your genre area, for several reasons, and it's better to have this information before you write - or at least before your final polish. The main reasons are:

1. You're writing a story for other people to read. Those people have their expectations, things they want to find in books of this genre if they're going to be persuaded to spend their hard-earned money.

2. As a result of No 1, publishers also have their expectations. Quite simply, if they don't please readers, they go out of business.

3. It's easier for a beginning writer to get published if a story is of a clearly recognisable genre/type and if the query letter from the writer shows an understanding of where the novel being offered sits in that genre ie demonstrates professional knowledge and approach.

In order to learn about your genre, you need to read at least 50, preferably 100 books in that genre - and not old ones or classics, either, but books as recent and successful as you can find. Yes, really! It doesn't matter whether you're intending to write a modern relationships novel, a science fiction adventure, a horror tale, or a literary novel, you still need to understand the parameters.

Parameters are not the same as rules! Don't regard them as limitations for writers, but as a practical starting point, something concrete that you can study and understand in a professional way.

In workshops, I've had people exclaim in horror at this idea of genre parameters and one man even walked out on me when I insisted on discussing this idea. (He had already told me loftily that he was going to write a book which would not fit any category, a 'good' book.) Don't fool yourself that your novel is going to be so utterly different that it won't fit anywhere! You're a human being, writing about other human beings. You can't avoid that. There are novels that combine two or more genres, but these are still recognisable as genres and the books are defined as cross-genre novels.

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