Why are high fantasy elves always graceful and long-lived? Why are necromancers and liches always evil? Why do sci-fi gunfights always involve lasers or plasma or some other kind of energy weapon? Why do war stories always seem to include a grizzled platoon sergeant – and why are they always wise and full of practical knowledge?
I’ll tell you why: genre convention.
Genre conventions are a set of unspoken rules within a given genre of fiction, rules which serve to regulate the way certain characters are presented, how certain plots are structured, and how certain worldbuilding elements are contextualised. For most writers within a genre, these conventions are often taken at face value, as the way things have always been done – much as someone might accept an argument as “common sense” even if they have no idea where that argument came from and whether its premises are even valid in the first place. As a result, most writers will simply take these conventions as they are, copying their tenets uncritically because these conventions have become so wide-spread and so commonly accepted that they’re considered part of the genre itself.
I do not want you to be like most writers – and I have a few good reasons why.
Firstly, the most obvious one: if everyone writing within a genre is using the same conventions the same way, then adding to that massive pile of work which has gone before you isn’t going to make much of a splash. If anything, it’ll be derided as derivative or unoriginal. You’re not going to get anyone’s attention by writing another story where a conventional protagonist goes through a conventional character arc to achieve conventional goals in a conventional setting. Your sword-wielding teenaged farm boy off to fulfill an ancient prophecy to destroy the primordial sealed evil and his army of extremely ugly minions isn’t going to stand out in a very crowded field unless your storytelling is very exceptional on a technical level – and even if it is, there are going to be a lot of people who write it off before they can fully appreciate the quality of your storytelling.
The second reason might leave your story even worse off in the long run: namely the fact that these conventions had to come from somewhere, and in a lot of cases, they were codified by early pioneers in these genres – ones which were written all the way in the early days of mass-market genre fiction, which is to say way in the early part of the 20th century.
To say that some of the authors of these works may have held implicit or explicit attitudes which might have aged like milk might be a bit of an understatement.
That isn’t to say that using a genre convention is going to make you look like the kind of person who campaigns for whites-only drinking fountains or the reinstatement of the Test Act, but it does mean that those conventions are often shaped by prejudices that aren’t looked upon kindly by most normal people anymore. Look carefully, and it’s hard not to see the description of “monstrous” humanoid species in high fantasy as having roots in the European colonisation of Africa and the Americas. Likewise the “alien warrior species” (who all seem to talk a big game and actually kinda suck at war) in science-fiction.
Scratch a little bit at an Orc or a Klingon, and you might find yourself looking at a long-dead colonialist’s view of a Zulu or a Mohawk. Poke a bit at the hostage princess (fantasy or sci-fi, take your pick) and ask yourself why this particular gender dynamic is still kept in the name of “historical accuracy” in a quasi-medieval setting with new world crops like potatoes, magic, dragons, and 16th century plate armour – with not a single 16th century firearm in sight. Perhaps it is because the convention is less accurate to the conventions of any real historical inspiration for the setting, and more towards the historical attitudes of the writers who codified that convention in mass media? Why do the ‘good’ kingdoms always seem so culturally Anglo-American? Why do so many ‘evil’ sorcerers have East Asian facial hair?
I could keep going for a while – in fact, I could probably write a whole other article about particular conventions, where they come from, and whether they’re worth interrogating, but I think I’ve made my point. Even if the attitudes of society have changed since the time those conventions were codified, the conventions themselves might implicitly endorse certain worldviews which either the creator or their audience might find uncomfortable, if not outright abhorrent. A creator who wants to have complete control over what they’re actually saying when they tell their story is one who needs to know where these conventions come from, and how to use them in a way which tells the story they want to tell, not the remnants of a story which was first published before women were allowed to vote.
The third reason is the most important of all: the fact that a writer who understands genre conventions will also be able to use them properly.
After everything I’ve written about the problems that genre conventions pose, you might be tempted to do everything you can to avoid using them, or to subvert or deconstruct them wherever you can. Try to avoid that temptation for a bit – because there’s a reason why these conventions got codified in the first place.
English writer, philosopher, and general all-purpose wit G. K. Chesterton once coined a concept now referred to as “Chesterton’s Fence”, which more or less can be summed up as arguing that before you tear down a fence, you should figure out why it was put up in the first place. The same goes for literary tropes and genre conventions. Although it might be easy to see them as arbitrary creative decisions which became a sort of canon through inertia and peer pressure, there’s always a reason that they – as opposed to some other creative decision – became codified in the first place. Usually, that’s because they render a given character type or worldbuilding element relatable to the intended audience, or communicate a lot of other elements through implication.
Take for example, the idea of the “good king” in fantasy: this is a guy (and it is usually a guy) who’s wise, down-to-earth, hires and listens to good advisors, is humble in his dealings with others, listens extensively to the “common” people, and has a keen interest in their well-being. He tries to avoid unnecessary wars, and generally sees violence as a last resort. This is definitely not how real medieval European kings were appraised by their contemporaries. There’s a reason why Richard Coeurdeleon (Richard the Lionheart, for those of you who don’t speak the only language Richard himself actually spoke fluently) had to have all of his rough edges sanded off to make for a good “traditional” king. However, the genre convention of the “good king” doesn’t come from a medieval understanding of kingship, but a modern understanding of good governance in the Anglo-American tradition.
To put it more simply, the high fantasy “good king” isn’t supposed to read as a good king to the people whom high fantasy settings are supposedly based on, but to people living in modern western liberal democracies who see the concept of good government in an entirely different way. That means this convention serves as a ‘shorthand’ for the intended audience, telling them that this character is supposed to be beloved and respected without necessarily having to explain in detail what they’ve done and why they’ve been able to win that respect: we (the audience) can make that assumption they are beloved and respected – and are beloved and respected for good reason – because they embody traits in a political leader which we would respect.
All genre conventions are like this. They come from an intention to imply certain things to an intended audience in a way which means the writer won’t have to waste time and effort explicitly laying them out. Once you understand what these conventions are intended to imply, and why they were chosen in the first place, you’re then able to dissect them critically: maybe you disagree with the fundamental assumptions of that convention (a die-hard anti-monarchist might argue there’s no such thing as a ‘good’ king at all, for example), or maybe you think that some of those implied contexts are no longer as valid (for some reason, the idea of equating fair skin and blond hair to moral virtue and purity seems to be less universal after World War Two) – or maybe, you want to play with those conventions, to use them to deconstruct those same implications, to tell a story about the gap between the expected result of a genre convention and an alternative – perhaps more realistic – interpretation of how that convention might play out under different circumstances (witness the coming to grief of a ‘good king’ archetype in A Song of Ice and Fire’s Eddard Stark).
This last sort of thing doesn’t have to be deconstructive or opposed to the conventions it plays with either. Sometimes, it means transplanting conventions from one genre to another and letting conventions from different traditions interact with each other in new and interesting ways. For example, in the 70s, some folks combined visual and literary conventions from 30s pulp science fiction, 50s war movies, and 60s Jidaigeki flicks to create a story which had ray guns, space ships, captive princesses, ace fighter pilots, high-stakes bombing missions, evil daimyo, and exiled ronin all in one package.
It’s called Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. You may have heard of it.
This is all to say that genre conventions are tools: there are times when a specific convention will make your life easier if it’s the kind of thing you need for the story you want to tell. If you’re really skilled with it, you can use it in ways which it was never intended or designed for to create entirely new and exciting results. At the same time though, you could easily use the wrong genre convention for the job if you don’t know what you’re working with well enough – and some genre conventions will create unwanted side-effects or problems which you probably don’t want to deal with. That means as with any other tools, the key to using genre conventions effectively is to know the history and the dynamics of the genre you’re writing, to understand the kinds of stories which have already been told in that genre, and to understand where those conventions come from, why they were written by those who first codified them, and what kinds of stories they were meant to tell.
That might seem like a lot – and it is – but you have to remember that storytelling is a skilled trade, just like carpentry or welding or automotive repair – and while badly used genre conventions might not have the same effect on a single individual as a badly assembled staircase or a loose brake pad, it could still have an impact on the lives and the enjoyment of thousands of people. That gives us a responsibility to tell the best stories we can, in the way we want to tell them. That means we need to understand, and wield the tools we have at our disposal responsibly, just as much as if they were wrenches, drills, or blowtorches.
Paul Wang 