Genre

Genre is any style or form of communication and art in any mode, with socially agreed-upon elements, or conventions, developed over time. The word comes from the French for "kind" or "sort". Genres are not properties of a single work: they are amalgams of shared conventions, and works commonly fit several at once by borrowing and recombining them. In literature a genre may be determined by technique, tone, content or length, and genre should not be confused with age category or format; the theory reaches back to Plato and Aristotle's Poetics.

For novel and web-serial writers, genre is the shelf the whole catalog organizes by: it decides which readers find the story, which conventions they arrive expecting, and which promises the story then meets, delays or subverts. The commercial pole is genre fiction, the prestige pole is literary fiction, and the shelf-by-shelf guides, starting with how to write fantasy, take the labels one at a time.