[00:00:00] Now, the most important thing that we're going to talk about today is genre. Genre is so important, and people overlook this all the time. I can't tell you how often I'll get a manuscript to critique, and the person doesn't actually know what their genre is, or they're trying to do too many genres.
[00:00:32] Oh, you know, this is a romantic, historical adventure mystery. Okay, that's too many genres. It's too many genres. And what we're going to do here is we're going to separate genres in terms of the world of novel writing from genres according to Hollywood. Because at the end of the day, it's a little overwhelming, all of these supposed genres in the world of manuscripts, in the world of novels.
[00:00:59] The truth is there's a difference between what Hollywood defines as a genre versus what we think of as genre in the literary world. So I want to briefly go over what I would say are the primary genres of literature, but then I want to look at what really counts, which is Hollywood. And I say what really counts because that's the point of this course, is looking at your novel from a Hollywood point of view to help enhance it and to help break through to another level in the market.
[00:01:30] But briefly, let me run down the categories that exist in literature for novels. Number one would be literary fiction. What literary fiction means. Is that it's literary in style. It's really well written stuff. It's fiction. It could be really any genre. And that's part of the problem here and why we want to go with Hollywood genre.
[00:01:56] But it's a step above. It's not a bubble gum book or it's not a throw away book. It's actually really well written in terms of what we would call classic literature. Alright, so that's literary fiction. Number two, historical fiction. Pretty self explanatory, meaning the historical events took place, but we're telling a fiction story within that actual, realistic, historical event.
[00:02:20] Number three, science fiction. Now, sci fi involves stories that are inspired by scientific concepts, physics, astronomy, anthropology, chemistry, astrophysics, something that is related to the science, and a lot of times these are futuristic or they are parallel dimensions, there's time travel, there's all sorts of things like this that are related to scientific concepts.
[00:02:44] So science fiction. Horror. Horror is a genre that is meant to shock and frighten readers. It usually entails things that are gory, or things that are really, really dark. It could be things like vampires and ghosts and monsters, but notice that could also be fantasy. Right? So it could be fantasy horror, or it could be like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where it's a human person who does all these icky things.
[00:03:13] The Shining would be an example of a horror genre, which of course was then turned into a movie. Tragedy. Tragedy is meant to elicit feelings of sorrow in the audience, so they're supposed to feel sad. Generally speaking, tragedies involve characters who experience hardship and some sort of emotional pain.
[00:03:37] But of course, that should be all characters, really, no matter the genre, so we'll come back to that. Number six romance and again romance focuses on love stories, right? It's the love story component. The focus of the entire novel is on the romantic connection usually between two main characters All right, number seven would be the Western.
[00:03:59] Now the Western involves stories about settlers or outlaws and cowboys in the Western frontier and usually take place in a particular timeframe, usually in America in the 19th or 20th centuries. Now there are certain things that are always true in a Western and that's why Western is its own kind of category.
[00:04:21] Number eight is a category called Bildungsroman. Which is a very complicated name, but basically it's a literary genre that focuses on a protagonist's emotional, physical, and moral growth over the course of their journey. But of course, I think all characters go through a huge emotional change and that's the point of this course.
[00:04:42] So we'll come back to that. Alright, number nine, a fable. Now a fable is usually a short story of sorts that teaches a particular moral lesson. Or it's a moral dilemma that the character has overcome, and then we as an audience are supposed to apply that to our own lives. Number ten, thrillers. A thriller genre is meant to keep your reader or your viewer in suspense.
[00:05:10] It's supposed to make them very, very emotionally tense. But, not to be confused with a mystery. Number 11. The mystery genre, which is often called a detective genre or the detective fiction, involves giving your readers a plot that the detective is trying to solve throughout the story. So, you are trying to solve a crime, basically, and it usually starts with a thrilling opening, which is usually the crime.
[00:05:39] Okay, number 12, Magical Realism. Now, Magical Realism is a literary genre that depicts the real world. While adding magical or supernatural elements. In magical realism, the characters don't view magic as odd. It's considered common within the setting of the novel. Number 13, fantasy. Now the fantasy genre involves imaginary settings, imaginary beings, imaginary universes.
[00:06:12] This genre includes elements that don't actually exist in the real world. Mythology and ancient folklore. Number 14, dystopian. Now writers who use the dystopian genre are usually writing about societies that are broken and they're usually trying to warn us and give us an idea of what's to come and call us to action.
[00:06:37] A lot of times what will happen is you combine dystopian with another genre. Fantasy, for example. A lot of times we see sci fi used in a dystopian way. Okay, number 15, mythology. Mythology is a literary genre that reveals human behavior using symbolism within the writing. That usually deals with the gods and the goddesses and that sort of thing.
[00:07:05] Okay, number 16 would be non fiction. So, nonfiction genres include things that are true. This is biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, essays, true stories about real people that aren't necessarily autobiographies, but are retelling of that sort of event. So, those are typically what we see as the genres that you're looking at.
[00:07:32] There's so many more subcategories in the world of fiction writing like Steam Punk is a category, but that would be a sub genre of science fiction. And steampunk has its own rules and its own science and its own types of things that it's dealing with. And so this can go ad infinitum, right? So I've given you the 16 sort of main categories that we would see in literature.
[00:07:56] And then there's all sorts of subcategories. But now what I want to do is I want to give you a much more narrow view of genres that Hollywood uses. What defines a genre in Hollywood is that you sustain a particular emotion and that the genre represents that emotion throughout the entire story, which is why it's narrowed down, right?
[00:08:21] Now, many writers rebel against genres as if they are refusing to be labeled or defined and somehow they think that's good, but it's actually foolish. Knowing your genre helps you to find the right audience for your story. It helps you to be able to market it. It helps with the commerciality. It helps you to sell your story because now the people, the powers that be that you're talking to, your publisher, your agent, that sort of thing, they know who to market your story to.
[00:08:49] So you can't underestimate the importance of genre. You need to identify your genre. And when you write for your genre, you need to write it. Relentlessly. You need to stay on track. It can't have all these nebulous things. You can maybe combine two, right? Two categories. And I'll get to that in a minute.
[00:09:09] But knowing your genre helps you to find an audience and it helps you to stay on track so that you leave that audience satisfied, which is the key. The real point is that different genres have different rules that must be followed in order to satisfy the audience. It's a contract with your audience.
[00:09:29] Your audience knows what each genre, what the rules are, even if it's on a subconscious level. So if you don't deliver, they're going to be displeased. But if you do, they're going to want to read everything that you have, right? Because they're attracted to that genre and you deliver well on it. So, it's all about leaving your audience satisfied since you'll know the markers that they expect to be hit along the way.
[00:09:58] Exactly. You need to know what the markers are that they expect you to hit along the way. And here are the genres, according to Hollywood, as well as their associated emotions that helps you determine this. Number one thriller thriller is one of the primary genres according to Hollywood. And what is the associated emotion?
[00:10:24] Fear or suspense when we watch a thriller we expect to be in Fear we expect to be in fear now notice. I said suspense because Part of the sub genre, if you wanted to break it down further, you might say it's a mystery, or you might say it's a detective story, but those are actually sub genres of this category.
[00:10:47] The key is to determine the emotional feeling that you are trying to convey through your story, and trying to identify that will help you to actually deliver on it, because you must write relentlessly for your genre. Number two in Hollywood is drama. Drama can encompass a lot of things. You might have a historical drama.
[00:11:09] You might have a present day drama. You might have a sci fi drama. The key is what emotion you're trying to convey. Compassion, sorrow, that is a drama. You're trying to provoke those feelings from your audience. Number three is horror. Now horror is different from thriller. Thriller is fear and suspense, horror is terror.
[00:11:37] It's a different dimension altogether. It's a different level of fear. So when you tell a horror story, it has to be truly terrifying. You can't mix a bunch of other things in with a horror. You have to write relentlessly for that. Now, there can be a category, which we've seen a lot recently, where it's a comedy horror.
[00:12:02] Nevertheless, you have to have the horror part of it. You have to provoke that terror even in the midst of the comedy. Okay, number four is actually a comedy. Now what is the primary emotion that you're trying to elicit in a comedy? It's joy, joy. You're trying to get people to laugh. In Hollywood, they say that if you write a comedy movie, you have to have three laughs per page.
[00:12:32] Three laughs per page that's hard to do. It's actually really hard to write comedy, which is why there's kind of a new Subcategory coming out of it. That's a dramedy which is where you're not laughing three times per page It's not a true comedy, but it's got comedic elements It's kind of dramatic, so we're going to call it a dramedy, but we're calling that a sub genre.
[00:12:56] Comedy is the main thing, and it's the joy, the joy, the joy that we are eliciting from our audience. All right, number five is action. Action is the adrenaline rush, the anticipation, the excitement, the surprise. It should be an exciting adventure, right? And underneath that, we might have a family adventure or we might have an action comedy or we might have an action drama or we might have, I mean, there's any number of things, but the key is that if it's action, if action is its root, it's got to happen fast.
[00:13:35] There's lots of things happening. It's going, it's going, it's big. It is adrenaline, anticipation, excitement, and you've got to produce that. You've got to elicit that from your audience. Okay. So the reason all of this is important is because Hollywood only knows how to market these genres. So if you throw in something new, they don't know what to do with it.
[00:13:58] You need to know how dependent Hollywood is on the genre system. And then be relentless in your genre. If you're writing Jaws, you're writing Jaws relentlessly. Even if you're writing a novel, you need to be consistent with your genre. It is super important. And these are the five categories in Hollywood.
[00:14:19] So you need to look at your story and go, okay, which of these five categories? Now, of course, there are sub genres. That probably fit a lot of what we talked about with the literary genres, right? You could have an action thriller. You can have a dramedy. You can have an action comedy. You can have a historical drama or you can have a historical comedy like Shakespeare in Love or a historical romance, right?
[00:14:45] There's all these things. You can have An action adventure sci fi, right? Or an action adventure fantasy. Or you can have a fantasy thriller. Or a fantasy horror. You can have any category of this. But notice the base categories by Hollywood standards are Thriller, Drama, Horror, Comedy, and Action. And that is the key here.
[00:15:13] The bottom line is that by Hollywood standards, it's all about conveying a particular emotion. And writing your story well is about sustaining that emotion throughout the entire read. If I'm three pages into a thriller and there's no rush, it's badly written. If I'm halfway through a comedy and I'm not laughing anymore because it got too serious, Then it isn't well written and it's not going to do well in the marketplace.
[00:15:44] So your job is to identify your story among these five categories, see what it is. And then of course identify the subcategory because the subcategory has rules of its own that need to be followed. But this is about the emotion. What are you writing? And then how can you write relentlessly for this genre?
[00:16:04] And that's what you're going to look at writing. Now, when we come back, we're going to explore four basic kinds of story based on the genre system, and we're going to look at a little bit more information that is going to help you to know how to tell your story well. But this is your assignment, figure out of those five Hollywood genres, what is yours?
[00:16:29] What is the basic genre? And then identify any sub genre categories that you need to know the rules for, because every sub genre has rules also that need to be followed.