Your genre is one of the foundational, defining decisions you’ll make about your story.

And yet, the ways we learn to talk about genre aren’t all that useful for writers. It’s really difficult to draw foundational, story-shaping meaning from words like “fantasy” or “women’s fiction.” They don’t give you much to hold on to.

So I’m going to give you a totally different way to think about genre—the version that’s actually useful, honestly essential, in your revision process. It’s also flexible, inspiring, and empowering.

Let’s explore genre as a revision tool that works for you.

Genre.

It’s the bane of your existence—a confusing swirl of words to describe books that mean almost the same thing, but somehow still don’t tell you anything useful about your story. Are you writing sci fi or fantasy? Paranormal or supernatural? Chick lit, women’s fiction, or romance? Upmarket or book club? What do those words mean, anyway? Can your book be seventeen things at once?

Or genre is a restrictive box with tropes and conventions you feel like you need to cross off a checklist, until your story is more “paint by numbers” formulaic than an original creation unique to your imagination.

Or genre is a necessary evil in your query letter—your task is to say the right genre words to the right agent to appeal to their interests and make them want to request your manuscript.

Genre can be all of those things, for sure. A convoluted soup of arbitrary descriptors. A cookie-cutter formula that homogenizes creativity. An industry puzzle where if you get it right, you get a book deal, and if you don’t, you fail.

But what if genre is something else entirely?

What if there’s a way to approach genre that makes it, first and foremost, a tool for you, the writer?

A tool that isn’t arbitrary, but built on the fundamental root of why we tell stories in the first place.

A tool that doesn’t stifle creativity, but shines a light on what’s most important in your story.

A tool that’s not about performing in the publishing industry, but empowering you to craft the story you most want to tell.

In this article, I’m going to share that version of genre. We’ll unpack the marketing language that you’re probably familiar with. I’ll show you what it tells you, and what it doesn’t. And then, I’ll share the genres that tell you what you actually need to know about your story when you’re revising the story you truly want to tell.

If you’ve studied Story Grid, what I’m about to share is going to feel like a familiar refresher. I learned this from Shawn Coyne at Story Grid.

If you haven’t, well, you’re in for a treat. Learning this transformed how I edit stories, and I think it will for you too.

All right. Enough preamble. Let’s get to the good stuff.

And let’s start with an important definition:

What Is Genre?

Genre is a way of categorizing things—in this case, books—so that like is grouped with like. It’s a way of identifying similarities between books and gathering them together.

Think of the last time you walked into a bookstore. There might have been a Sci Fi shelf, a YA shelf, and a Cookbooks shelf.

And those shelf labels are important because they help readers find books! If you’re looking for the latest Andy Weir novel, you go to the Sci Fi shelf. If you’re looking for the latest John Green novel, you go to the YA shelf. If you’re looking for the latest Ina Garten cookbook, you go to the cookbook shelf.

There’s a ton of variety on each of those shelves—but it’s variety within a certain set of expectations that allow us to group similar things together.

So genre is a way of categorizing books with similar qualities. Which begs the next question:

What Qualities Are We Using to Categorize Books?

This is where genre gets really interesting.

Here are some genres you’re probably familiar with:

• Dystopian YA
• Adult Romantasy
• Upmarket Historical Fiction
• Southern Gothic
• Hard Sci Fi

Let’s break those words down and see what they’re actually describing.

Audience Age

YA and Adult: These words are describing the age of the audience for this book.

Setting in Space, Time, Realism, and Mood

Dystopian, Historical, Southern Gothic, Sci Fi, the “fantasy” part of Romantasy: These words are describing the setting of the story in space, time, realism, and mood.

A dystopian setting is typically an apocalyptic imagining of the future.

A historical novel is set in a real place and time in the past.

A Southern Gothic novel is set in a moody, haunting American South.

A sci fi setting could be anywhere in the universe, but relies heavily on technology—and the “hard” part of “Hard Sci Fi” indicates that that technology needs to be really grounded in real physics, even if the specific devices are imaginary.

And a fantasy setting could be anywhere in the universe, but relies on some variety of magic.

Style

Upmarket: This is describing the style of the book on a spectrum from literary to commercial.

Literary fiction puts a heavy emphasis on beautiful language, rich character development, and quiet plots.

Commercial fiction puts a heavy emphasis on exciting, engaging plots.

And Upmarket straddles the line between them.

Marketing Genres Help Readers Find Books

Here’s the key: All of these categories are helpful for readers to find books they’ll enjoy, books that will give them the emotional experience they’re looking for.

All of these categories are helpful for publishers to decide how to market to those readers—to identify where those readers are looking for books, what images those readers need to see on the front cover, and what words those readers need to see on the back cover in order to recognize that this book is for them.

All of these categories are helpful for agents to pitch books to the publishers who can reach those readers.

None of those categories tell you, the writer, what should happen in your story.

(With one slight exception—but we’ll get to that in a moment.)

The audience age, the style, the setting, the realism, the mood—none of that tells you anything about the content of your story.

None of that tells you what inciting incident will spark your story. None of that tells you what goal your character will pursue. None of that tells you what kind of conflict will take place in the climax. None of that tells you how your characters and their world will change by the end of your story.

Those genres do not describe your story’s plot or your story’s character arcs. They help readers find your book. But they offer you very little help in planning, writing, or editing your book.

I consider them marketing genres: they’re helpful language to market your book and make sure it’s placed on the right shelf at Barnes and Noble. But they’re of limited use when it comes to structuring your story.

So what does help you edit your novel? What categories describe not the setting or the audience, but the plot and character arcs?

Content Genres Help Writers Craft Stories

The content genres go beyond surface-level details to describe the conflict at the heart of your story. There are twelve content genres: Action, War, Horror, Crime, Thriller, Western, Love, Performance, Society, Status, Morality and Worldview.

The first nine genres are external genres, describing the plot and external actions of the story.

The last three genres are internal genres, describing the character arc and internal transformation of the characters.

These genres aren’t arbitrary. They weren’t chosen at random from the dictionary. They don’t even come from, say, a survey of all the books on the shelves right now at Barnes and Noble.

No—these genres exist because they all address our core needs as human beings struggling to navigate a complex world.

The External Content Genres

The Action genre exists because we need to survive, and this world is full of threats to our lives, from lions to tornadoes to Darth Vader.

The War, Horror, Crime, and Thriller genres exist because survival and safety become much more complicated when you’re in community with other people.

Sometimes, individuals within a community can’t be trusted to act in the collective interest. Sometimes, entire groups of people at scale come into conflict with others. And sometimes, monstrous enemies beyond our comprehension threaten not only to take our lives, but condemn us to a fate worse than death.

The Western or Eastern genre exists because navigating the tension between the authority of a community and the authority of the individual is difficult. When should we sacrifice our own sovereignty in order to participate in a community, and when should we reject that governance and assert our individual authority?

The Love, Performance, and Society genres exist because we want more from other people than simply reassurance that they won’t hurt us. We want them to like us, love us, respect us, care for us.

The Love genre exists because we need people—as romantic partners and as friends—and yet relationships are complicated. How do we find, build, and maintain loving connections with other people?

The Performance genre exists because we need our community’s approval. How do we demonstrate our worthiness and gain the approval of other people?

The Society genre exists because as soon as you bring people together, we develop hierarchies and power dynamics. Who has power? How does their power work? And how do we shift the balance if that power becomes tyranny?

The Internal Content Genres

Thus far, all the external content genres. The internal content genres also describe our fundamental human needs:

The Status genre exists because we need our community to respect us, and we need to respect ourselves. What are we willing to do or sacrifice in order to rise in social standing?

The Morality genre exists because life is constantly presenting complex moral challenges, and we are forced to choose how to navigate them. How do we overcome our own selfishness and make morally good choices?

The Worldview genre exists because the highest accomplishment we can ever achieve is self-actualization. When faced with something beyond our understanding, how can we process it and grow into the best, wisest, most mature version of ourselves?

The Content Genres Align with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

If you’re a student of psychology, this escalating exploration of human needs might be pinging something familiar. All these genres can be mapped onto Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs.

At the bottom of the pyramid are the physiological needs: the fundamental food, water, shelter, etc. that we need to survive. In other words, the Action genre.

Next are the safety needs: the need for security and resources within a society. That’s the realm of War, Crime, Horror, and Thriller.

Next are needs for love and belonging: in other words, the Love genre.

Next are needs for esteem, for third-party validation and self-respect. That’s the realm of the Performance, Society, and Status genres.

And at the top of the pyramid are the self-actualization needs: the realm of the Morality and Worldview genres.

I say all this to emphasize that the content genres tap into the fundamental heart of what stories are. What stories are about. What stories do for us as readers, as consumers, as students of the human experience.

These content genres are independent of the superficial external trappings like how old your audience is or how literary your language is. These content genres are the central core that makes the story work. The rest of the genre terms are simply stylistic choices for how you’d like to deliver it.

You Can Mix and Match Content Genres and Marketing Genres

You can put any content genre in any setting. You can write it for any audience. You can write it with the most beautifully literary prose or the most prosaic commercial style.

Of course, there are pairings that are more common than others. YA Dystopias, for instance, are often Action stories, because the dystopian setting lends itself to questions of survival: how do we protect ourselves and others when society has fallen apart? That’s The Hunger Games.

But Dystopias are also often Society stories—can we overthrow Big Brother in 1984?

And a lot of Dystopias, though not all of them, also include a Love subplot—think Katniss and Peeta. Or sometimes the Love story is the main plot: consider Warm Bodies, a zombie retelling of Romeo and Juliet. It’s a zombie Dystopia with a Love primary genre and a strong Horror subplot.

Or, let’s look at Sci Fi. Star Wars, Ender’s Game, Alien, and Firefly are all Sci Fi stories. But Star Wars is an Action story. Ender’s Game is a War story. Alien is a Horror story. And Firefly is a Western, set in space.

I love Firefly for a number of reasons, but one is that it illustrates perfectly how the content genre core can be placed in any setting. It’s not the setting, or the audience, or the style that determines the plot and stakes of the story, but the content genre.

There are also pairings that are uncommon. I doubt there are many children’s books that are War stories, for instance. But honestly, I bet there are a few. After all, there are children growing up in war zones, and those children desperately need stories to help them survive injustice and horror beyond their comprehension.

Because that is what stories do: they show us how to navigate a complex world. How to meet our fundamental human needs in difficult circumstances that threaten our ability to survive, to join together in community, to find love and belonging and respect, and to become the best version of ourselves.

The content genres allow you to identify what that core of your story is.

The rest of the categories? They’re marketing language to give your content genre core a unique flavor and help it reach its readers.

Some Marketing Genres Give You Content Genre Clues

Now, I hinted way back at the beginning that one of the marketing genres I mentioned does give you content clues.

That genre is Romantasy.

Romantasy is a blend between Romance and Fantasy. Fantasy, remember, is a setting—you can put any content genre in a Fantasy setting.

Romance, though, is a marketing genre that always points to the Love content genre. Anytime you see a romance, you know you’re in for a Love story.

So a Romantasy novel is going to include a Love story, and it’s going to be in a Fantasy setting.

I mention this so that you know: sometimes the marketing genres do happen to point to content genres. Romance novels are Love stories, murder mystery novels are Crime stories, and horror novels are, well, Horror stories.

But while marketing genres can offer clues about the flavor and tone and genre blend of your story, the most important way you can use genre in the revision process is to identify your content genre and use it to orient the foundations of your story.

That will tell you so much more than “Hard Sci Fi” or “Upmarket Historical Fiction” or even “Romantasy” ever could.

Choosing Your Content Genre Is Tricky

Now, hopefully everything I’m saying sounds so clear and logical that this feels super easy to grasp and inspiring to apply to your story. But I do want to give you a fair heads up: figuring out your story’s content genre can be really tricky.

For some genres, the ones where the content genre peeks through in the marketing genre, the choice is fairly clear. A romance novel will be in the Love content genre.

But it can be tough to figure out whether your sci fi story is Action or War or Horror or something else entirely. In your current manuscript, you might have signals of several different genres, and choosing which one your story is actually about can be a real challenge.

There are a lot of ways to figure out your story’s content genre. And identifying the content genre is one of the most important things I do with clients inside of Story Clarity, my big-picture story revision package.

But for now, I want to give you just one way to start exploring your content genre. Well, two, because I couldn’t resist.

2 Questions to Begin Identifying Your Content Genre

Here’s the question I want you to ask yourself:

What fundamental human need is your story exploring? Where on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs does your story fall?

If that’s tough to answer, an easier way in might be:

What’s at stake in your story? What do your characters gain if they are successful, and what do they lose if they fail?

That’s your first clue to identifying your story’s content genre—and to using genre as a truly effective editing tool.

Dig Deeper in the Content Genres

Now, if you want more on genre, I’ve got you covered. I’ve got several more episodes on genre coming up where we’ll dig into how to use the content genres to edit your story.

I have a conversation with my friend Savannah Gilbo, a fellow editor and book coach, coming soon that’ll get into how she coaches writers to use genre at various stages of your writing process, and how to troubleshoot common genre problems.

And I’ve got a conversation with my friend Kim Kessler, whom you’ve heard on the podcast before. She’s an absolute genius at the internal genres, which are the key to crafting powerful character arcs, so I’m excited to share her wisdom with you.

In the meantime, if you want to go deeper into all these genres, definitely grab the Content Genre Overview. In it, I list all the genres and what fundamental human need they explore.

And I also link to podcast episodes on each content genre so you can study them in more detail. Those episodes come from Savannah’s podcast, Fiction Writing Made Easy, because she has excellent episodes on each one.

Download it for free by entering your email below:

That’s all for now. I’ll leave you to ponder:

What’s at stake in your story?

Until next time, happy editing!