: Re: 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

@Kevin153

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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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