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UNDERSTANDING GENRE:

NOTES ON THE THRILLER

"Genre" simply means a kind of literature (usually fiction) dealing with a
particular topic, setting, or issue. Even so-called "mainstream" fiction has
its genres: the coming-of-age story, for example. In the last few decades,
genre in North America has come to mean types of fiction that are
commercially successful because they are predictable treatments of familiar
material: the Regency romance, the hard-boiled detective novel, the space
opera. Some readers, writers and critics dismiss such fiction precisely
because of its predictability, and they're often right to do so. But even the
humblest hackwork requires a certain level of craft, and that means you must
understand your genre's conventions if you are going to succeed--and
especially if you are going to convey your message by tinkering with those
conventions. For our purposes, a "convention" is an understanding between
writer and reader about certain details of the story. For example, we don't
need to know the history of the Mexican-American War to understand why a
youth from Ohio is punching cattle in Texas in 1871. We don't need to
understand the post-Einstein physics that permits faster-than-light travel
and the establishment of interstellar empires. And we agree that the heroine
of a Regency romance should be heterosexual, unmarried, and unlikely to solve
her problems through learning karate.

As a novice writer, you should understand your genre's conventions
consciously, not just as things you take for granted that help make a good
yarn. In this, you're like an apprentice cook who can't just uncritically
love the taste of tomato soup; you have to know what ingredients make it
taste that way, and use them with some calculation.

So it might be useful for you, in one of your letters to yourself about your
novel, to write out *your own understanding and appreciation* of the form
you're working in. I found this was especially helpful with a couple of my
early books, which fell into the genre of the natural-disaster thriller. Your
genre analysis doesn't have to be in essay form; it just has to identify the
key elements of the genre as you understand them, and that in turn should
lead to ideas about how to tinker with the genre's conventions. And *that,*
in turn, should make your story more interesting than a slavish imitation of
your favorite author.

As an example, here are my own views about the thriller:

1. The thriller portrays persons confronting problems they can't solve by
recourse to established institutions and agencies; calling 911, or a
psychiatrist, won't help matters in the slightest.

2. The problems not only threaten the characters' physical and mental safety,
they threaten to bring down the society they live in: their families, their
communities, their nations. This is what is at stake in the story, and should
appear as soon as possible.

3. The solution to the characters' problems usually involves some degree of
violence, illegality, technical expertise, and dramatic action, but not more
than we can plausibly expect from people of the kind we have chosen to
portray.

4. The *political thriller* portrays characters who must go outside their
society if they are to save it, and the characters therefore acquire a
certain ironic quality. They must be at least as skilled and ruthless as
their adversaries, yet motivated by values we can understand and admire even
if we don't share them.

5. The *disaster thriller* portrays characters who are either isolated from
their society or who risk such isolation if they fail. That is, either they
will die or their society will fall (or both) if they do not accomplish their
goals. In the novel of *natural disaster,* the disaster comes early and the
issue is who will survive and how. In the novel of *man-made disaster,* the
issue is how (or whether) the characters will prevent the disaster.

6. The characters must be highly plausible and complex; where they seem
grotesque or two-dimensional, we must give some valid reason for these
qualities. They must have adequate motives for the extreme and risky actions
they take, and they must respond to events with plausible human reactions.
Those reactions should spring from what we know of the characters'
personalities, and should throw new light on those personalities.

7. The protagonist's goal is to save or restore a threatened society; it is
rarely to create a whole new society. In this sense, the thriller is usually
politically conservative, though irony may subvert that conservatism.

8. At the outset the protagonist only reacts to events; at some point,
however, he or she embarks on the counterthrust, an attempt to take charge
and overcome circumstances.

9. The progress of the protagonist is from ignorance to knowledge,
accomplished through a series of increasingly intense and important
conflicts. These lead to a climactic conflict and the resolution of the
story.

10. With the climax the protagonist attains self-knowledge as well as
understanding of his or her circumstances (or at least *we* attain such
knowledge). This knowledge may well create a whole new perspective on the
story's events and the characters' values: A murder may turn out to have been
futile, or loyalty may have been betrayed. We should prepare for these
insights early in the novel, so that the protagonist's change and development
are logical and believable.