“Like the ever-spliting branches of a huge tree.”

“Lullabye For Kara” / Sanctuary at 3:00 am / Rick Sowash

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Genre: Category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.

In so many ways, storytelling today is wrapped more and more around genres as the viewing audience becomes more sophisticated and always like to see clever twists in the type of story they like to be told. Like to believe.

The Story Grid pinpoints 9 genres. Like structure steps, genre is a huge contested question today at a time when genre becomes more tied to plot in a tighter and tighter manner. In his establishment of 9 genres, Coyne is pretty much in the range of Hollywood screenwriters in the key number of genres they identify.

Coyne might be right on his genres in book publishing when the book was written in 2015. But it would be interesting to get some type of update from Coyne for this ten year interim. Has there been updates since then? In his ideas about genre? The number he identifies?

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This symbiotic relationship between genres and structure continues to grow and sometimes it amounts to simply being able to play out the steps of the genre better than the others competing with you. Whether in books, films. Any outlets for story genres.

One of the reasons for this might be attributed to our later stage of capitalism and a sophisticated (dumbed down) consumer market that has expectations created by the American culture and economy as well as the Global economy. Consumers do not consume entertainment anymore (like they might have done in the early years of books). Rather they consume specific types (genres) of entertainment in specific media (film,book,music,tv,podcast).

Probably the greatest book on genre in stories yet written is John Truby’s recent The Anatomy of Genres (2023). The screenwriting guru notes there are 14 major genres: Horror, Action, Myth, Memoir, Coming of Age, Science Fiction, Crime, Comedy, Western, Gangster, Fantasy, Thriller, Detective, and Love Story. They move from the most primal issue (death) to the most transcendent (connection).

Truby makes a good argument for his genre theory in his book. Truby argues the relationship between story form and structure are tighter than ever today. In fact, heis teaching writing in genres more and more.

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Audiences used to arrive at entertainment with few expectations. Except to be entertained. Over the years, they learned what type of entertainment they liked. Like everything at Darwin said, it evolved into greater specialization or genres.

Audience arrive to view something with expecations and the author needs to 1) know these expectations first and 2) satisfy these expectations. The fact is, genres or sub-genres continue to break and evolve from key genres. Like the ever-spliting branches of a huge tree, the smaller and smaller tributaries of a great river.

A successful author needs to know not only how to write but how to write to expectations of the readers/viewers and satisfy these expectations. Expectations were once to simply read a book since there was no other media competing with it. Now, the expectation is to read/see the genre favorite book/film/music. Is it of any wonder that in a world broken into smaller and smaller products and ideas, the same has happened with our story-telling. Broken into smaller and smaller ideas, themes and sub-genres. Smaller and smaller stories that no longer know how to capture big stories and lives.