What Are Genres?

Genres are simply conventional categories for explaining what something is, usually writing, but they can also apply to rhetoric. Things within the same genre share certain traits, and some genres are more flexible than others.

For example, a work cannot be a romance without a romantic relationship developing between characters. It cannot be a mystery if there is no plot-defining conundrum that must be solved. It cannot be nonfiction if the author made it up (or so we hope).

But to be called a science fiction, all a work needs is to have even a slight bit of creativity with time and/or science beyond where either element is in the present day. That can be a future society, a spacefaring setting, or a modern-day story with just a few more gadgets than we actually have now. What are now generally called "alternate histories" have been considered at times to actually be science fiction.

And speaking of blurred lines, science fiction and fantasy have the closest, since science fiction really is a subset of fantasy. Most people have their own nuances of definition. A good simple one is to call it a fantasy if it's magic and sci-fi if it's science, but even then you can find books that bounce between the lines. (The Deathgate Cycle, for example, could be thought of as either, though it's really more… er… both.)

Continuing the description of genres, the novel and short story are each a genre, too, that people can often easily identify. The other fiction genres due to length—microfiction, flash fiction, novelette, novella—have different definitions depending on who you ask. Generally speaking, though, anything too short to be a short story is "microfiction" or "flash fiction", while anything too long for a short story but to short for a novel is a "novelette". (This is an oversimplification.)

The age groupings for novels likewise constitute genres. Children's, YA, and adult fiction all have their distinguishing characteristics that make them the genres they are.

Can something meld genre lines? Certainly. But genres are like grammar: you have to know the rules before you can legitimately break them.