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Bend and Break

This week I want to take a lil’ shallow dive into genres and their associated conventions – but not the type of genres you may be thinking of!

“Horror”, “Romance”, “Fantasy”, “Sci-Fi”: these are all important labels for marketing your book. It helps the right audience find your book so there’ll be less disappointment and more five stars. Genres also work as a promise to your reader. A reader will go into your book with certain expectations that, if broken, lead to dissatisfaction. If you wanted to read a romance book, picked up what you thought was gonna be a romance book but it turned out there was zero romance and 100% scary, gory horror, you’re gonna put down that book and rate it pretty poorly, despite the actual quality of the writing. It wasn’t what you were expecting! It wasn’t what you were promised.

So, we’ve established that genres and their conventions are important, right? Well… Yes, these traditional genres are good for marketing purposes, but we’re not quite at that stage in The Alex Method series.

So, instead, I want to introduce you to ‘Save the Cat’ by Blake Snyder. His book is about writing screenplays but I think there are some great storytelling techniques here that can most definitely be applied to novel writing. These genres are very different to traditional genres and, rather than labelling the general ~vibe~ of the book, describe the type of plot. I find these genres a lot more useful for getting to the real heart of your story and guiding you towards writing a satisfying book. And, at the same time, they aren’t too strict about their conventions and allow for a lot of interpretation and creative freedom (which we definitely like here at the Chaos Cupboard!)

One day, I want to do a deep-dive series on each of these new genres but for now, I’ll just list them here so you can get a flavour for each of them and decide how best to use this tool for your own creative practice. The explanations for each aren’t super comprehensive but I’ve added each of their main ingredients so hopefully you can get the gist of them and how to use them. (Also note that you can have more than one of these genres in your story – one for your A-plot and another for your B-plot, for instance.)

‘Whydunit’ (aka a mystery/thriller type story) = A detective, a secret, a dark turn

‘Golden Fleece’ (aka an adventure story or a ‘Dora the Explorer’ type plot) = a road, a team, a prize

‘Rites of Passage’ (aka a coming-of-age story) = a life problem, the wrong way to solve the problem, acceptance

‘Institutionalised’ (aka plots where the antagonist is an evil/corrupt system rather than an individual per se – think of most dystopias) = a group (the Institution), a choice, a sacrifice – join, burn it down, escape

‘Superhero’ (not necessarily an actual superhero – more so a story about an extraordinary guy navigating an ordinary world) = a power, a nemesis, a curse

‘Dude with a Problem’ (kinda self-explanatory, I think) = an innocent hero, a sudden event, a life-or-death battle

‘Fool Triumphant’ (your classic underdog story) = a fool, an establishment (that has labeled the fool a fool), a transmutation

‘Buddy Love’ (this includes romance stories as well as your buddy-roadtrip kinda stories) = an incomplete hero, a counterpart, a complication

‘Out of the Bottle’ (this is your genie plots and your ‘careful what you wish for’ plots) = a deserving hero, a spell, a lesson

‘Monster in the House’ (again quite explanatory – usually these come in the form of horror stories or mysteries) = a monster, a house, a sin

As an example, one of my upcoming projects, Decadence, looks a bit like this:

‘Decadence’ is, partly, a ‘Buddy Love’ story. The incomplete hero is the main POV character, irresponsible Caisley. His counterpart is the highly-responsible (notice the complete opposite in personality) Decadence. And the complication is Decadence’s dark secret (which I won’t spoil for you though, teehee.)

This is already quite a long post but I wanted to add something real quick. Some of you may be thinking “Isn’t this kinda formulaic?” And I don’t blame you for that – it was my first thought while reading Save the Cat myself. It has also been one of my fears when writing specific genres and reading listicles about genre conventions.

But here’s the difference between conventions and what Blake Snyder has created here: he has provided us with ingredients, not hard and fast rules. And these ingredients, as I said, are open to interpretation and out-of-the-box thinking.

Bend and break them however you please. >:)

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