Genre Crimes

Somebody decided that stories belonged in neat little boxes, and the rest of us have been arguing about what goes where ever since. Fantasy goes over here, science fiction over there, horror gets the creepy basement, and romance can have the room with the good lighting. Every box comes with its own rules, expectations, and a collection of readers who know exactly what belongs inside. And God help you if you put a dragon in the wrong one.

Genre is a funny thing. On one hand, it’s incredibly useful. Tell someone you’re writing a murder mystery, and they immediately have a pretty good idea of what they’re getting into. Mention a space opera, and they’re expecting starships, strange worlds, and probably somebody with an unnecessarily complicated title. Genre gives writers a common language with their audience. It’s a promise about the kind of experience a story intends to deliver. On the other hand, those promises have a nasty habit of turning into commandments.

This column is about the conventions, expectations, clichés, and unwritten rules that shape genre fiction. More importantly, it’s about what happens when writers follow those rules, bend them, break them, or occasionally drag them into an alley and beat them senseless.

We’ll spend plenty of time in fantasy, science fiction, and horror, with occasional excursions into mystery, thrillers, romance, and whatever other literary neighborhoods seem worth investigating. Sometimes we’ll examine familiar tropes and figure out why they’ve survived for generations. Other times, we’ll question conventions that have become so deeply ingrained that nobody seems to remember why they’re there in the first place.

Why do fantasy stories keep returning to chosen ones and ancient prophecies? Why does science fiction so often assume humanity will take its existing problems into space? When did horror decide that splitting up was always a terrible idea? And why does every detective in fiction seem to have a drinking problem and a spectacularly dysfunctional personal life?

These aren’t necessarily complaints. Tropes become tropes because they work. At least, they worked often enough that everybody started borrowing them. The trouble begins when writers stop asking whether a familiar convention serves their story and start including it simply because that’s how these things are done.

Of course, there’s another side of this particular crime scene. Sometimes breaking the rules produces something extraordinary. Sometimes it produces an absolute dumpster fire. Being unconventional doesn’t automatically make a story clever, any more than following a formula automatically makes it terrible.

The trick is understanding what those conventions actually accomplish before deciding whether to throw them out.

Genre Crimes isn’t interested in declaring what writers are allowed to write. We’ve already got plenty of people doing that, and frankly, most of them could use a hobby. I want to know how these conventions became so deeply entrenched, who’s still defending them, and whether some of them deserve another chance before we start digging graves.

There will be opinions. There will be arguments. A few beloved stories might find themselves on the receiving end of some uncomfortable scrutiny. Mine included. I’ve committed enough genre offenses to have a record of my own.

But that’s the fun of it. After all, if we’re going to commit literary crimes, we might as well understand which laws we’re breaking.

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