How to Choose a Genre for Writing a Story

Anyone holding a half-finished story, or a novel idea still coming into focus, often asks the wrong question first: “what story do I want to tell” instead of “what genre am I telling it in.” They’re two different questions, and the second one has a more practical answer than it sounds like. According to Purdue OWL, identifying a text’s genre means looking at four connected elements together: the conventions that govern it, the expectations it raises in a reader, the purpose it serves and the audience it’s aimed at. They need to be read as a set: a text can follow the surface conventions and still miss the point of the genre it claims to belong to.

Conventions, built through use

Writing Commons describes a genre’s conventions as shared norms between writers and readers, built over time inside a community through repeated use. A mystery reader expects clues, a poetry reader expects a certain relationship with form, and that expectation exists because thousands of earlier texts built the habit. No outside authority declared it by decree. A writer steps into that network of shared habits, and can follow it, bend it or break it, but has to know it’s there first.

Understanding a convention also helps when reading texts that play with it openly. Our Recap on The Name of the Rose looks at how the novel plays with mystery conventions inside a historical frame, using reader expectations as narrative material in its own right.

Practical example: mystery fiction is organized around gathering clues one by one, according to the University at Buffalo Libraries guide: it’s this convention that sets the genre apart from other kinds of fiction. Within the same genre, though, there are at least two different setups: the whodunit, centered on a crime that already happened and needs reconstructing, and the thriller, centered on action unfolding in the present. The choice between the two changes how the plot gets built from the first page on.

Reader expectations

Every genre carries, according to Writing Commons, a shared expectation between writer and reader about how a text of that kind should be structured and presented. Meeting reader expectations doesn’t mean telling the same story every time. It means giving readers the footholds they need to orient themselves, then using that space to surprise them.

In fantasy that expectation takes a particular shape: internal consistency. F(r)iction calls it the main risk for anyone writing in the genre, because if a reader notices that the rules of the imagined world don’t add up, they lose the suspension of disbelief, meaning they stop believing the story while reading it. Horror and weird fiction play with a similar mechanism: our Recap on Lovecraft’s non-Euclidean geometry shows how the horror comes precisely from world rules pushed to the breaking point while staying consistent with themselves.

Practical example: once a world rule is set, how magic works, for example, the fantasy genre requires following it all the way through, or the whole story’s credibility collapses. That’s why choosing fantasy or science fiction means an extra round of groundwork other genres skip: building the rules for how technology or magic works from scratch before even touching the plot.

Purpose

The third criterion shifts attention from what a text says to what a text does. Purdue OWL suggests a practical way to check whether a text really sticks to its chosen genre: look at what each individual part is doing for the overall purpose, not just what it seems to be about on the surface. A chapter that looks like a mystery on the surface, clues, suspects, a twist, but actually works to build a coming-of-age novel belongs to a different genre than the one it appears to be at first glance.

This criterion applies outside fiction too, and the contrast is useful. Our Recap on the Petrarchan sonnet’s structure and rhyme scheme describes a form with fixed conventions, fourteen lines, a precise rhyme scheme, built to concentrate a thought into a short space: a different purpose than a novel’s, which has all the room it needs to follow a character over time.

Audience

The fourth criterion, audience, is the one most often forgotten while writing, because it sounds more like a marketing question than a writing one. Knowing who a text is aimed at changes the pace of its sentences, how much explanation it allows itself, even how long its chapters run. A genre aimed at a young audience tolerates less moral ambiguity than one aimed at adult readers, part of the same network of shared expectations Writing Commons describes.

The four criteria give a way to get your bearings when you’re not sure which genre you’re actually in.

Put all four together against a manuscript, and they hand back a more precise answer than any one of them would alone. For a broader look at what literary genres actually are, our Recap on literary genres: novel, short fiction, poetry and theatre still works as a wider map to start from.