As the title suggests this post is going to be largely concerned with issues of Genre in keeping with both the Lecture and Workshop this week. Firstly looking at the way the Workshop played out, it was interesting to study just how much different Genres can overlap. Not just Fantasy and Sci-Fi as was explored in the lecture. The idea that one scene can be interpreted in many different ways is one that I did not consider until it was brought to my attention that you could literally take the same scene, in this case a woodland or forest at night and write several different plots or scenes across many genres. The ones we looked at were the big five, Fantasy, Sci-fi, Crime, Romance and Horror. It is in the vein of this exercise that I wish to put forward a series of very short stories, almost flash fictions for my portfolio, which take the same setting and explore it in different genres. This I think has great potential to not only provide interesting material for my portfolio, some of which is already in the works and will be posted later when I have had a chance to work on it some more; but also it allows me to explore a wider range of Genres within the course than I might be otherwise inclined to do.

So moving on to focus a little more heavily on Genre, the most interesting part was realising just how much Genres can overlap in their subsets but also just as a whole. For instance sorting out what was essential and what wasn’t really helped put genres into perspective, Sci-fi for instance tends to be futuristic, your ideas of aliens and spaceships but the idea of alien worlds and races is something that can also apply in fantasy. But romance can fit into any genre fairly easily, sounds obvious but it was a little bit of an eye opener, particularly in regards to defining my own works to look at the ins and outs or the blocks that make up each individual genre. On one level it begged the question does Genre really matter as anything other than a marketing tool, if the lines are this blurred can you really know what to expect in a fantasy novel. I think personally I think that whilst they are a good marketing tool the labelling is becoming less and less useful often the headings of Genres being far too general to describe the subsets.

For example is the Science Fiction changes its meaning based on current trends in literature. Right now people would think Dystopian with the popularity of the Hunger Games series and other such similar novels, whereas before it might have been more spaceships and space empires with shows such as Star Trek or Star Gate being popular. The same is true of fantasy when you compare the current trends Game of Thrones dominates the field when fantasy is considered at the moment, in much the same ilk as Tolkien has for many decades and yet they are different. The Game of Thrones is much more political and has less of the fantasy races that define the high fantasy of the Lord of the Rings that was continued by authors such as Elizabeth Moon. In such light I would say that Genre definitions are becoming more important and less, I think that more lines need to be drawn with the many subsets of each Genre and that blanket terms such as fantasy, no longer tell us as much as they might have before.

This week’s sessions have encouraged me to think more about the components that go into my own writing, not just to take an idea or inspiration and run with it; but too think more about how Genres really can define what we think should go into a novel. As such it has made me think about the different ways that I could blur genres in my own work and encouraged me to experiment more with Genre and not stay within the more core components of each Genre. I have already started working on portfolio ideas as mentioned that I think should be uploaded sometime in the next few days so stay tuned.

Hope you guys are having a great week.

Hugh