In the huge range of texts we write, distinguishing among them helps us know what we are writing, helps readers know what to expect, and helps us connect our pieces to readers who will enjoy them. Today we’ll discuss three central ways texts are distinguished from one another: mode, genre, and form. These tools help us as writers attend more carefully to our texts, helping us craft the best pieces that we can.
As with most literary terms, the ideas I lay out below are fluid, overlapping, and not standardized: you may find these terms used somewhat differently in different contexts. Common language in the world of writing is a topic for another day. For now, we will work with what we have, and that’s okay.
Mode
Mode is perhaps the largest demarcating tool to distinguish among texts, and it categorizes based on a text’s primary purpose. Usually we differentiate narrative, expository (informative), and persuasive modes of writing. Each brings to it for the writer a different set of tools to be used that affect style, tone, form, and content.
Fiction is almost always primarily in the narrative mode, in that it tells a story, but it is useful to consider how some fictional texts are actually not primarily narrative. Jonathan Swift’s eternally-shocking “A Modest Proposal” uses an ironic persuasive mode, and satirical, fictional news articles like those in The Onion use an expository mode.
As a fiction writer, I find value in considering mode for a couple of different reasons.
First, it helps me grasp differences between fiction and other types of texts. Conventional rules that we are taught for school writing (which is primarily expository or persuasive) are often vastly different when it comes to the narrative mode. Rules for paragraph divisions are a primary example here: we use significantly different criteria to decide how to divide and organize paragraphs in narrative as opposed to expository or persuasive writing. Recognizing the core difference in mode can help us be more confident in our stylistic decisions, because they are grounded in a narrative mode that allows kinds of experimentation less available to us in other modes.
Second, I’m excited by the potential of working with expository and persuasive modes within fiction too. With the above satirical examples as starting places, I really wonder about the potential to write fiction through other modes. I’m thinking about fictional news reports (not necessarily satirical), about fictional websites, about fictional advertisements–of course these types of texts are not abnormal to see within the context of a larger (narrative-mode) piece of fiction, but I wonder about them standing in isolation. It’s something I would like to experiment with.
Ultimately, mode is a useful tool for our thinking about everything we read and write. It helps us consciously consider purpose, whether it is our own or that of another author, and thus assess relevance, bias, and effectiveness.
Genre
Genre makes a closer-up distinction among texts, grouping them primarily by their content. A term used primarily with reference to artistic texts (that is, less applicable to non-literary non-fiction), genre categorizes broad trends in content to help readers find similar stories to those they have enjoyed in the past. So we have a genre of science-fiction stories, including texts that deal with futuristic or non-real science-related content. Historical fiction, romance, horror, and fantasy genres similarly denote primary attention to a particular type of content. Literary nonfiction too has genres–true crime, nature writing, biography, memoir, etc. Poetry’s genres might include lyric, confessional, epic, nature, narrative, and plenty more.
It is worth noting that more than mode, genre is a freewheeling term that can be used for groupings of literature large and small. The recently burgeoning genre of climate-change fiction, the steady run of dystopian fiction, vampire fiction–all these are called by their readers genres in their own right, and then they also fall within the larger umbrella-genres of science fiction or fantasy. Sometimes the term subgenre is useful, but any attempt to lay out genres quickly becomes messy, and invariably a genre gets left out.
Genre can become a politicizing or even oppressive categorization. LGBTQ+ literature is often called a genre. On the one hand, this is helpful, because it allows people seeking LGBTQ+ stories to find them readily; on the other hand, relegating these stories to one genre limits their reach, suggesting they are not mainstream, and occludes other relevant aspects of the texts behind this overarching label. The same is true of literature by all marginalized groups. By labeling the stories as part of, for example, African-American literature, a story is closed off from the possibility of being seen as universal and relevant to everyone. How many texts called “The Great American Novel” were written by a person of color? These are just the outlines of a much larger discussion that deserves its own post. for now, these are ideas to consider. The lesson here is to be careful with genre labels and to consider how their application might undermine a text’s real value.
One oddball among fiction genres is the category of literary fiction. Literary fiction seeks to push back against the idea of content-based genres, instead centering writing technique itself as the focus. Literary fiction seeks, in a way, to be outside of genre, and hence you will hear a distinction made sometimes between “literary” and “genre” fiction. There are, I believe, significant misunderstandings here on both sides of this question. Within the literary fiction community, there is an idea that writers working squarely within genres are lazy or reliant on convention, that they don’t care about craft. Within genre circles, literary fiction is seen as snobbish, and as if all that is cared about is writing technique, a kind of empty exercise. This too, I think, is a big enough topic for another post, so I will leave it by for now.
As writers, it is important to interrogate our own relationships with genres. Where do we see our writing? What genres do we read? What are readers of a particular genre expecting? What are they not expecting that might nevertheless be welcome, and what might go too far?
Form
The final topic of investigation in today’s post is form, a categorization larger in scale than genre but smaller than mode. Form categorizes texts based on their structure, serving as a kind of mold into which the content fits.
Within the mode of expository texts, for example, such forms as the news article, the exposé, informative pamphlets, sets of instructions, and others are all distinct, based on the way these texts are structured. Poetry has perhaps the widest array of distinctly recognized forms, from the open free-verse at one extreme to the highly-structured forms of pantoum and sestina (to name only two), which take into account such structural elements as rhyme scheme, rhythm, length, repetition, and sometimes even (blending here somewhat with genre) the expected content of a particular form. Within fiction, dictates of form are based primarily on length. The length dictates of the forms of flash fiction, short story, and novel create other differences based on what can fit into the space allowed.
Form matters in writing. Various poetic forms carry an internal meaning within the form itself. Form can cue reader expectations about content and style. Form plays a role in publication, that while some publications accept texts that challenge traditional forms, most still seek texts identifiable in terms of form or genre. As with any writing rule, form’s value comes in the choice of the writer at every moment to follow or to break it. Working consciously within forms can help us meet readers’ expectations, create pieces more likely to find publication, and understand our writing in juxtaposition to other writers’. Experimenting beyond the form can teach us more about what is possible.
Mode, genre, and form give us three ways to think about our writing more deeply, to situate it within the broader range of writing that exists, and to think too about the subtleties of these systems of classification, where they can be helpful, harmful, followed, or subverted. Some of us might work consciously within a single mode, genre, and form; other times we may branch out–one piece here, another there. Either way, let’s be aware, keep uplifting underrepresented voices, and keep writing.
What is your relationship to mode, genre, and form? What other ways of distinguishing among texts do you find useful? Does much of your writing fit within a particular niche of mode, genre, and form? Where are you experimenting?
Best wishes for the coming week,
Jimmy
Words like trees 