Coming of age

Coming of age in its base sense is "a young person's transition from being a child to being an adult," which many cultures mark with ceremonies; the story genre built on it is "a genre of literature, theatre, film, and video game that focuses on the growth of a protagonist from childhood to adulthood." Its subjects "are typically teenagers," and it tends to "emphasize dialogue or internal monologue over action."

Within it, the bildungsroman is "a specific subgenre of coming-of-age story": coming-of-age novels and Bildungsroman are "sometimes interchangeable, but the former is usually a wider genre." Its variations include the Künstlerroman, the artist's novel of self-growth. For the writer it is an arc before it is a setting: the plot must move the protagonist from a younger self toward an older one; the seven stages of coming of age map that movement.