- [David] Hello, readers.
Let's talk about the
idea of genre in fiction.
Genres are types of stories
that share similar themes,
styles, or subject matter.
So science fiction is a genre,
fairy tales are a genre,
mysteries are a genre.
Each one of these types of
stories has certain elements
that you gradually come
to expect from them.
Fantasy stories have magic
spells and imaginary creatures.
Romance stories have lots of smooching.
Mystery stories have a crime
and a person who tries to solve it.
You can call these tropes, you
can call these style elements
but certain genres have
certain expectations
embedded in them.
The more you read of a genre,
the more your expectations
are shaped for that genre.
When a story begins with the
phrase, "Once upon a time,"
and ends with "and they
lived happily ever after,"
you know you're looking at a fairy tale.
We all carry with us a unique collection
of impressions and expectations.
It's your background
knowledge, your schema.
If you think of your brain as a closet,
then schema is the hooks
and clothes hangers inside that closet.
You can put a new shirt
on a clothes hanger,
you can hang pants or a
skirt on a clothes hanger,
but if you wanted to hang up a dress,
you might need one of those
fabric-covered hangers
so it doesn't slip.
And if you wanna store
shoes in your closet,
you might need to get a shoe rack
or one of those hanging shoe organizers.
Just as different clothing
items require different,
you know, closet infrastructure
like hangers or shoe racks,
your schema, your background knowledge,
informs the sort of literature
you know how to read.
That's a weird sentiment to
express, I think, but it's true.
The first time you read a
book in a particular genre,
you're forming an
impression of that genre.
And that impression
gets refined or revised
with every similar book
you read after the first.
Reading widely across
many genres of fiction
expands your brain closet.
But let's be clear here.
Not every book is connected
with every other book.
And when you try to apply
something you learned in one story
to another story, it may not work.
For example, in 20th
century detective fiction,
there is a recurring theme or
trope that dates to the 1930s:
the butler did it, which is to say that
if there's a murder that takes
place at a fancy manor house,
there's a good chance that
the butler is the murderer.
But if you go into every mystery
set at a fancy manor house
assuming that the butler
is the guilty party,
you'll be wrong a lot.
Famously, in Agatha Christie's
Murder on the Orient Express,
everyone did it.
Every suspect in the mystery
is responsible in some way
for the murder in the title.
It's an enormous conspiracy,
and Christie plays with
the readers' assumptions
as we go through the
story, knowing that you,
as a person who has probably
read a mystery before,
or who is at least familiar with the form,
has an expectation that there
are only one or two culprits,
only one or two people that did the murder
to the guy on the train.
And look, I apologize for
spoilers for a story from 1934,
but you can't make an omelet
without breaking some eggs,
you know what I mean?
Anyway, it's neat to look at the way
that an author can play with
the expectations of genre,
how an author might
anticipate a reader's schema
and play with that.
Something that blew my
mind when I was in school
was the idea that Star Wars was a western,
or at least takes many of its cues
from classic pulp western movies.
Let's draw a little Venn diagram.
All right, so over here,
we've got Star Wars
and over here we've got
the western movie genre.
Here are some things that Star Wars has
that westerns don't have.
Space wizards like the Jedi and Sith,
magic like the force, or space ships.
Here's some things that
western movies have
that Star Wars movie's
don't, by and large, have.
Western movies have horses,
they tend to have cowboys,
and then tend to take place in settings
like the western United States and Mexico.
But here's our overlap, all right,
so both Star Wars and western
movies have bar fights,
both Star Wars and western
movies have bounty hunters,
and both the Star Wars
films and western films
tend to have a lot of desert settings.
That could be the desert planet
of Tatooine from Star Wars,
or Monument Valley in
the US state of Texas,
or the Mexican state of
Durango in western films.
Mind you, you could also
make a separate Venn diagram
between Star Wars and samurai movies
because Star Wars also
borrows liberally from those.
This is a great activity for analysis.
Take two stories that you love
and compare their theme,
settings, and characters,
and see if there's something you can find
in common between them.
You may discover connections
you didn't expect.
As I've mentioned before,
good readers read widely.
They read lots of books and they let
what they know about one genre,
their schema of the genre,
help them anticipate and make connections
when they read a new book.
The more you read, the
more schema you build,
the easier and more interesting
those connections will become.
You can learn anything.
David out.
