: Is genre ever relevant to the writing process? I'm a strong believer in genre being largely a thing that's used for marketing, an easy shorthand for book stores to know where to place your

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The stage at which, I feel, genre is most important to the writing process is not in writing stories, it's in creating the setting. During the worldbuilding phase genre conventions can be very useful to informing choices starting from the very ground up, for example if the setting genre is Science Fiction then I'm building world(s) that, broadly speaking, conform to the planetology rules we know and understand. A Fantasy world need not be so restricted.

If writing with an aim at a particular genre then there are conventions and tropes that one needs to be aware of. Not because you're necessarily going to use them or even mention them yourself but because your audience, whether the general or the critical, will expect some treatment of them. For example if you say "this is a fantasy" convention dictates that you include magic of some kind, to some extent.

There are also words that have a freight of expectations that need to be met, or at least discussed, in genre writing that are not present in other narrative styles. If one uses the word vampire for example one then needs to speak to the actual role of vampires in their world and the kind of vampires they wish to portray.

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In addition to the other answers, consider that specific genres may have additional requirements which will impact your storytelling. Not because of tropes, but by their very definition.

An obvious example would be "Play Fair" Mysteries, which have a built-in requirement that the reader has all necessary clues to solve the puzzle before the solution is revealed. So you have to keep that in mind, because if you don't then you're no longer in that genre.

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As much as anything else, genre can be a product of your writing.

If you sit down and write a story about a down-on-his-luck deadbeat detective, solving a murder case, and facing his demons, then the same plot can fit into multiple genres, depending on where you put the focus and tone.

Is it a noir thriller with a gritty antihero taking on the seedy underbelly? Is it a murder-mystery with a plucky underdog fighting the rising odds? Is it a redemptional Police-procedural with the beleagured protagonist overcoming his past and finding closure?

You could hit the same basic plot points with all three of those - and the editors will look at it and decide the genre afterwards. You could even start with one, and flow to another as the protagonist's outlook on life changes in response to events. (Of course, with this you run the risk that people who like the start of the book won't like it by the end, and people who would like the end never get there because they don't like the start...)

So - unless you deliberately want to hit a specific target audience - just "write now, genre later."

As an example on this: Before he died, Douglas Adams was trying to write a new Dirk Gently book. He was writing, plot was coming out, but when he read it back to himself it just didn't feel right to him: it was a story, and it was shaping up to be quite an interesting one, but - and this is where it hit him - it wasn't a Dirk Gently story. The genre of the text was "wrong", and it was coming out as a new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book.

With that, he took it back to basics, and adjusted the plot to fit the genre he was actually writing in. Unfortunately, he died before finishing it, but the work was eventually completeed by Eoin Colfer, as And Another Thing...

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You seem to be looking at picking a genre as signing up to follow a very tight straight-jacket on your writing. I don't believe that's what genre is at all. Rather, genre is a very loose set of related tropes and expectations, and as long as you don't break too many of those tropes and expectations without good reason, there's a ton of room for innovation.

Harry Potter is an interesting example. In terms of genre, it is an extremely straightforward fantasy young adult series. In fact, by going out of its way to incorporate as many sterotypical depictions of magic as possible, it leans into its genre very heavily. However, within that genre, it still does several things that are innovative and fresh. One major example is that the books start out very light-hearted but become darker and more mature as the series progresses. As a result, as the children who were introduced to the series grew up, the franchise continuously matched their level of maturity. I sometimes hear people talking about the books "growing up" with them as they got older. This is a genuinely artistic and unique structure for the franchise to take on. And it was completely possible even within the limits of following the expectations of genre fiction to a tee.

And no one is requiring you to adhere closely to a genre. There are many stories that don't fit neatly into genres or push their genres' boundaries. Artemis Fowl seemlessly mixes young adult, fantasy, sci-fi, and heist fiction together. Frozen and Kingsman: The Secret Service are strict genre movies that knowingly deconstruct their respective genres. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Rimworld franchises are deeply irreverent takes on sci-fi and fantasy that avoid the serious gravity that those genres usually strive to attain. Avengers: Infinity War hits every single blockbuster superhero movie trope in the book while still having a genuinely experimental structure that manages a cast of characters so expansive that it would normally be a huge impediment to a story and a plot that thematically treats the antagonist as the hero.

Ultimately, the individual tropes you use are not going to be what makes your story artistic or samey. It's the intelligence and depth of your characters, plot structure, and themes. These elements are what are emotionally resonant - and they are completely independent of genre. Consider that Romeo and Juliet and Westside Story have almost exactly the same characters, plot arc, and theme but wildly different genres.

If you focus on writing an excellent story by getting the narrative elements solidly nailed down, your story will be artistic and powerful whether it strictly adheres to genre or not.

In the end, as with any other element of a story, how you choose to relate to your chosen genre is a decision with no straightforward answer that changes from story to story. I suggest you don't look at it as a straightjacket where you have to fulfill certain reader expectations. Rather, it's a tool where many different approaches are valid, and finding the right approach for your story is the goal. And whatever you ultimately go with, your decision is still largely orthogonal to the other decisions you have to make with your story, leaving you with plenty of artistic freedom regardless of genre.

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Rewording other's answers, writers write for different reasons. Some write within a context whereby genre-alignment is appropriate (e.g. writing books for profit, scripts, writing within a genre per-se). And if you have seen tvtropes, you know it is very hard to avoid all genre elements. :-)

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Genre should influence process
Taking Wikipedia's information on genres as a general guide, then this is the description:

Writing genres ... are determined by narrative technique, tone, content, and sometimes length

While any part can affect the process of writing, the point I want to emphasize that will in some way surely affect it is content.
Consider these points:

Any non-fictional work is going to be relying more heavily than fictional on actual facts. A writer of a biography as a part of the process has to get the facts right, otherwise people will dismiss the work, but also has to help the reader know the person behind the biography. But a textbook writer, still needing to get facts right, instead has to succinctly and clearly convey information for someone to learn the subject of the textbook. And a lab report needs to just convey information accurately (perhaps in chart or table form).
Any fictional work is going to have "unreal" elements to it, and to some extent, those elements will play a greater or lesser role in relating to "real" elements. So a writer doing fantasy fiction as part of the process is going to have develop the world in which that setting occurs (worldbuilding). You cannot get around it, and the more different the world is from the real world, the more process will be involved in (a) constructing that world and (b) relating that different world to the reader in such a way that they understand it from their real-world perspective. A historical fiction will have a greater need to meet the requirements of the non-fictional genres, as actual facts of history will become increasingly important as the real-world elements are fit into the fictional aspect. Science fiction may have less freedom than fantasy, as many readers will expect some extra "fitting" to actual science theories that are out there.

So at a basic level, the various genres are going to exist on a spectrum of how much the author, in the writing process, must research and communicate accurately about reality and how much (if any) the author needs to build an unreal "place" and communicate that to an audience that has not (and will not) ever have that experience in reality.
Then, the other points of "narrative technique, tone, ... and sometimes length" are really what are going to end up classifying a work into a specific genre (since those are the points that so classify it). Here, those things need only be considered in the process if the author is specifically trying to target an audience group. Regarding these points, if you just "write what [you] want to write without heed for genre conventions," then that is okay, but realize that it will get categorized into a genre by others, and so you are leaving it to others as to who the target audience will be. If you are okay with that, fine.

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You must comply, resistance is futile.
It is precisely because genres are used to sell books that you should be very much aware of what is expected within the genre you write.
You need to tell your agent what you wrote, they expect you to give them a genre, or perhaps a twist on a genre: "Magic in modern high-tech urban setting."
They expect you to define an audience, young adult, new adult, etc.
Although you can write about a third of the story before deciding on these things, you should decide what your genre is, who your audience is, and revise what you've got to match it. If you have an explicit or strongly implied sex scene, you are new adult or adult. You are not young adult. If the rest of your story feels "young adult", delete the sex scene, it doesn't belong here.
Your agent, and your publisher, and bookstores, and online sites, need to know where to shelve your book, to reach your audience.
The agent will read your book, and reject it if you have violated genre norms without very early warning. If she doesn't know how to shelve it, she won't bother trying, there are 99 other people she can represent instead.
The same goes for the publisher; (and likely the agent won't even try a publisher if the book can't be categorized, because she doesn't want to ruin her relationship with them; they are trusting her to bring the good stuff, not problems). The bookstores in this venture don't want to take returns from pissed off customers, but they will and charge them back to the publisher, and eventually to you. And then the bookstore managers aren't dumb, they don't want any more of your books, and make a note that the publisher tried to sneak one past them.
That's the way the world works; when you are a multi-million bestseller, your name alone will sell your books, and you can step off genre as you wish. Agents, publishers, bookstores and your fans will give you some rope.
In the meantime, write what you will, but early on decide how you (or your partners in this venture, the agent, publisher and bookstore) are going to market it to an avid fan section. That, as you already know, means picking a genre. There is plenty of room for creativity and invention within a genre, they are very general, but you have to stick to the general rules. Put on the handcuffs! If you write a Romance, it must have a happy ending, that is what your readers expect, and unless you are a proven bestseller, your agent and publisher won't consider anything else for the Romance section. Period.
You must comply, resistance is futile.

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Minimally, but Don't Ignore Genre

Generally, I believe you are correct that genre should not be at the forefront of the mind during the writing process. I can say, however, that it is usually a good idea to form some idea of the reader you are writing to as you write. If you can get yourself into the mental state where you almost imagine yourself sitting in a comfortable setting with this reader telling them a story, you will find that your writing picks up a lot of energy. To do this, sometimes, you may need to understand genre readers who do expect certain conventions in order to make their understanding of what you are trying to communicate nice and smooth.

Conventions are nothing more or less than how our language actually works, so they are important for communication purposes. Bending language, but not breaking it, is a mark of a great poet, and bending genre conventions without breaking them is often the mark of a great novelist. To do that, you don't want to totally ignore those conventions.

The reason they can be useful is because it saves a huge amount of time to not have to explain from scratch everything that is assumed in order to make your story work. If the reader and writer are going into a story with some basic assumptions already taken care of, it lets you focus more on telling a story and less on explaining why it might be possible for faster than light space travel to be possible, or why a devastatingly handsome billionaire is actually single and also a decent person. If you are picking up a science fiction or a romance book, you are signalling a willingness to suspend disbelief in certain areas for the sake of a solid story. Kudos if you make things like that plausible, but you don't need to be shackled by starting from scratch and explaining literally everything.

So genre conventions can be a tool, just like rules of grammar, which can be bent when necessary, but for the most part serve to facilitate efficient communication. You want efficient communication, because that reduces the friction between your reader's comprehension and the story you want to tell. As I said earlier, genres can also serve to help give you a better picture of your reader. I believe that a lot of writers really suffer by cloistering themselves into writer's groups where they get feedback from (and come to deeply understand) people just like them, but not people who might actually buy and read the stories they want to tell. Understand that your reader is probably not like you. That's a good thing, because a novel is actually novel if it is opening experiences for a reader which they may not have ever had themselves and may never be able to experience outside of a good book. But to get a good picture of your reader, you may need to keep genre in mind at times.

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I can think of three specific cases where genre conventions can be an important part of the writing process:

You are writing a formulaic book, where the familiarity of it is the core of the appeal. It might not be a book that you or I might want to read or write, but well-written formulaic books have a stable core audience that craves the specific, reliable pleasures of that particular genre.
You are writing a book that reinterprets, reimagines or remixes a genre. It's a fairy tale in space (Star Wars). Or a detective noir in cyberspace (Neuromancer). Or a teen mystery at a magical boarding school (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). Whatever it is, it helps to really know the conventions of the genre you're tweaking before you tweak it.
You are writing a book that subverts, questions, interrogates or deconstructs a genre. And you can't do that unless you know what the genre conventions are. Whether you're writing Don Quixote (a deconstruction of medieval romances) or The Hero and the Crown (a feminist revision of epic fantasy), you need to know your source material really well.

In the end, however, the main reason to know genre conventions is this. It's easier to avoid cliches if you know what they are. It's often the people who are least familiar with genres that write the books that are the most like every single thing that came before. (Also worth noting: the books/movies cited above don't lack for popularity, critical acclaim, and influence).

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While I get with what you are saying, and I deeply agree, sometimes genre conventions can be useful.

If you want to tell a story - let's say, featuring a distant future and space-travel - you don't have to adhere to sci-fi conventions; mainly because genre conventions are, in a way, like a set of more commonly used "tropes". As a writer, everyone should be able to play around with the tropes he likes freely, and let the marketing people deal with the rest.
If you feel like there should be dragons in your story (along with space travel) you should totally add them, even if they don't fall in the sci-fi main scope.

As you mention, genres shouldn't be taken as fixed sets of rules that everyone must follow - that's just plainly wrong. They're more like loosely relevant tags to quickly categorize fiction.

But if you feel that you want to write something of a specific genre, let's say, a romantic story, you may want to look at other works for reference. In this scenario, having a "genre" in mind helps in searching what other writers have done (following the rule that reading is a crucial part of getting a better writer).

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