Treat Genre as a Conversation

Practice. Choose the genre your current Work belongs to, or comes nearest to. Read the opening chapters of two books you admire in it and, from them, write down three promises, meaning pleasures the reader came for rather than rules. Then write one sentence naming a deliberate transformation of the genre in your Work, and one sentence on what it costs and what it gains. If you can, ask a reader who loves the genre whether the Work still feels like one. The whole takes forty-five minutes.

A writer who doesn’t know the conventions either reinvents them badly or breaks promises the reader came for without noticing. One who treats them as a checklist produces something that satisfies the form and does nothing else. Whether you use, bend, or break them, “knowingly” is the word that matters.

Detective fiction is the field where the laws were written down. Ronald Knox, in the late 1920s, set out ten commandments for the form. The first: the criminal must be mentioned early in the story but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know. Another: the detective’s Watson must not conceal from the reader any thoughts that pass through his mind. A few years before, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Agatha Christie had made the first-person narrator, Dr. Sheppard, the murderer. On its face Knox’s first commandment forbids the arrangement she used; whether he had her in mind we have found no evidence either way. Sheppard’s narration surprises because readers of the form assume that a narrator-friend is honest, and the trick exists only inside that habit of the genre.

A genre’s promises are stored anticipation, and a surprise needs an expectation in order to register. A transformation spends that anticipation, and if the reader doesn’t know the convention it passes unseen, so the knowledge cuts both ways.

Knox’s fifth commandment barred any Chinese figure from the story outright. A genre’s habits can encode the prejudices of their moment, which is a reason to inspect conventions rather than inherit them. Strict fidelity can still be right. A reader of a cozy mystery came for particular pleasures (Practice 94 takes up learning a form before breaking it). A writer who delivers them with precision has done difficult work.