Genre, it turns out, is less a box than a promise. That was the idea I carried home from the first session in my Writing for Stage and Screen at Birkbeck.
The word itself comes from the Latin genus, reaching us through the French for “type” or “kind”. So far, so taxonomic. As a physicist I find classification schemes comforting: give me a periodic table and I will happily sort the elements all afternoon. Stories are less cooperative. The session opened with a warning that genre is not a formula to be filled in. The work that succeeds is the work that brings something new to a familiar shape, and the shape itself has more subgenres than anyone can comfortably list.
A few early examples made the point well. Touching the Void is full of danger, yet it is not a thriller; it is a personal story that happens to take place on a mountain. Brokeback Mountain borrows the landscape of the western without being one, because the western proper is about pioneers pushing a frontier, not two men failing to say what they mean. Setting, in other words, is not genre. Neither are suspense and surprise, which turn up in every form of dramatic storytelling. A thriller can be funny. Those are tones, not categories.
Four genres and a stack of layers
The backbone of the session was Phil Parker’s model of four prime genres, each defined by what the protagonist is trying to escape or achieve:
| Prime genre | The core struggle |
|---|---|
| Horror | Avoiding death or mental torture |
| Romance | Avoiding loneliness |
| Thriller | Searching for the truth in the face of a conspiracy |
| Drama | The personal struggle of the character |
Comedy and tragedy sit outside this list. They are tonal forces that can be applied to any of the four, which explains why a romantic tragedy and a comic horror both feel perfectly natural.
On top of the prime genre, Parker stacks further layers: style (film noir, mockumentary, action), world (the wild west, a dystopia, a period setting, science fiction), subject (crime, biography, the military) and tone (comedy, farce, revenge tragedy). I rather like this. It reads less like a taxonomy and more like a set of orthogonal axes, and any given story is a point in that space. Witness is a romance with a thriller wrapped around it. Let the Right One In is horror with a romance at its heart. Neither is a hybrid in any muddled sense; each simply occupies a different coordinate.
The model is useful, though I suspect it is tidier than the films it describes. The rest of the course should put it to the test.
The physics of plot
Whatever the genre, some building blocks hold everywhere. Tidmarsh identifies two basic patterns of dramatic story, both inherited from the Greeks and Romans and both in three parts: order, chaos, re-order, and choice, consequence, change. The first describes the world of the story; the second describes the character moving through it. Good drama usually runs both at once.
What holds these patterns together is logical cause and effect, and the session catalogued the ways it breaks. The ending rescued by a deus ex machina. Suspense stretched so long that the resolution is crammed into the final minutes. Plot holes. Characters acting out of character. Coincidences, which happen constantly in real life and which audiences refuse to forgive in fiction. Each of these leaves the audience feeling cheated, and a cheated audience does not come back.
My favourite example of the evening was a small domestic parable. A married couple go out to buy each other presents. She buys a gun; he buys chocolates. She dies after eating the chocolates. The story you tell depends entirely on where the writer chooses to point the camera, and a twist only works if the clues were planted fairly. A twist is a pact with the audience to mislead them honestly. Without the clues it is simply a lie.
What I am taking away
Three things stuck. First, genre is a set of coordinates rather than a category, and the interesting work happens when you move one axis while holding the others still. Second, every genre runs on the same engine of cause, effect and change, so a broken plot is a broken plot whether it wears a cape or a corset. Third, tragedy has been rewriting itself for millennia in response to what its audiences feared, which suggests that a genre is really a record of a culture’s anxieties.
There was also a practical note for those of us writing for the stage: plot development for theatre can be harder to outline than for the screen, because so much of the pressure lives in the room rather than in the cut. As someone with a play or two in progress, I felt that one.
The homework is horror: the 1933 King Kong and Conor McPherson’s The Weir. On paper they could hardly be further apart. One is a stop-motion ape climbing the Empire State Building; the other is four men and a woman telling ghost stories in a rural Irish pub. I suspect that is precisely why they were chosen, and I will report back on what we made of them in week two.