Navigating Prompts: Element-Based Genres

Sneaking a peek

If you’re anything like me, you’re given to sneaking a peek into the market basket of the person ahead of you in line. Sure, it’s gotten a bit more difficult with social distancing, but I can still make out a lot of the contents. I usually try to figure out what they’re cooking. For example, in the header picture for this post I can see carrots, lettuce, bell peppers, broccoli, radishes, tomatoes, maybe some celery, a pumpkin… um. A pumpkin? Fir needles? The only thing that calls for all these ingredients is a stock photo! But working with a few at a time you could make some amazing meals.

That’s what selecting a genre can be like. There are two main categories of genre: element-based and style-based. This month we’re dealing with element-based genres. Let’s reach into our basket and find out what’s lurking there! 

Ready, set, go

We’re going to look at genre prompts twice over the course of this workshop. This month, we’re talking about element-based genres. Later this year, we’ll take a look at genres that are recognized through the subtleties of writing style and word choice. So don’t worry if you don’t see your fave here! We’ll probably get to it, and if we don’t get to your specific genre of choice and you’re not sure which category it falls into, ask us in the Coffeehouse.

Why this prompt?

Genres are a classic prompt. They give one of the broadest ranges of options for the writer, with the fewest words from the prompter. Genres are easy to throw into a prompt combination, too, ensuring that all submissions will have the same general feel or theme and then exploring a specific question of interest through a tighter secondary prompt. For example, “science fiction” is broad and might get a variety of stories, but “science fiction + a mother” will ensure that all the stories about mothers have the same basic “feel” to them for purposes of pulling together an anthology.

(We note, for the record, that although it’s May and That Day is on a lot of people’s minds, people have different and complicated relationships with mothers and motherhood. We hope you’ll extend the courtesy of not judging how anyone experiences that, and of remembering not to be inadvertently cruel this month to people whose relationships and experiences with their mothers don’t mirror yours. If you had or have a great relationship with your mom, we congratulate you and hope you cherish that. If you didn’t and don’t, we see and believe you.)

Anyway, heavy stuff aside, genres are a delightful and easy-looking prompt. But you shouldn’t let that make you overconfident! Take the time to really consider and work through a genre prompt and your writing can only benefit from that effort.

How do you use it?

As always, your first step is to look at the instructions that come with the prompt. We said it at our birthday party in April and we’ll say it again, and we hope that your eyes haven’t glazed over yet because seriously there is no single piece of advice that will be worth more to you. A writing competition or anthology may define a genre more broadly or narrowly than the “standardized” definitions you find online. Wikipedia is only your friend here if the prompt instructions say it is!

If there are no directions, you’re going to have to pull together what that genre means to you. Like all prompts, the goal isn’t to get as far from the idea of the genre as you can while still arguably fitting the definition; it’s to land squarely in the middle of something that feels comfortable to most readers familiar with the genre.

In general:

Because genre prompts are so broad, they can seem easy. Don’t be fooled! You still have to give this prompt some thought. The first thing you’ll need to think about is whether the genre is the type that affects your writing style (like epistolary, high fantasy, or fables), or the type that affects what elements need to be included in your story (science fiction, urban fantasy, fairy tales). We’ll be dealing with the latter style this month, but we do want to note for the record that there are some genres that usually combine the two, like steampunk, where you absolutely must include specific elements but also many authors choose to write with a specifically Victorian vocabulary and grammar. We’ll flag these where it’s relevant both this month and when we tackle style-based genres, because if either the style or the elements are optional the way the vocabulary is for steampunk, we’ll be treating those genres as the other type. That is, for our purposes steampunk is an element-based genre and the vocabulary is one of those elements. We promise this will make more sense as we go.

On to the specifics…

Examples

We could describe prompts all day, but it’s going to be easier on you if we just give you some examples. There are effectively two ways to give you a genre prompt: as simply as possible with a minimum of information, or in a complex prompt laying out a description of the genre. Let’s look at some prompts!

Simple prompts

• science fiction
• fantasy
• romance
• romantic comedy
• historical fiction
• mystery
• fairy tale

A complex prompt (just one, because they take forever)

Detective stories are a subgenre of crime and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective investigates a crime, often (but not always) murder. The Encyclopedia Britannica lays out the elements of a perfect detective story as:

1. the seemingly perfect crime;
2. the wrongly accused suspect at whom circumstantial evidence points;
3. the bungling of dim-witted police;
4. the greater powers of observation and superior mind of the detective; and
5. the startling and unexpected denouement, in which the detective reveals how the identity of the culprit was ascertained.

Your story need not specifically contain all these elements, but it should be strongly influenced by your knowledge of them. That is, the “dim-witted police” might not be actual police but other investigators; the point would be that the detective is shown to be smarter or more effective than they are.

The detective may be professional, amateur, or retired, but this should be their “job” at least to the extent that you could legitimately call it their side hustle, whether or not they get paid for it. That is, they might be a retired police officer who lends their expertise on difficult cases; a detective working for the national, state or local government in some capacity; a science teacher who solves crimes on the weekends; or a “consulting detective” like Sherlock Holmes, who was a well-paid freelancer (who blew most of his money on cocaine, but that’s a different story). We’re not talking about you looking for your lunch or a couple nine-year-olds trying to figure out who broke into Mrs. Estramado’s desk.

The detective doesn’t need to be the point-of-view character (think of Watson, or of Nero Wolfe’s man-about-town Archie). The story doesn’t need to tell the entire history of the crime, investigation, and solution – it’s fine to focus on one aspect of the case, whether that’s calling the detective in or the denouement, so long as the other aspects can be inferred from what’s in the story.

You are not required to tell the story in a “noir” or “hardboiled” style (“I knew the dame was trouble from the minute she walked through the torn screen door of my office”), although you may do so if you like.

See the difference?

The simple prompt leaves you to come up with your own definition, but the complex prompt (this one is from our Super Challenge #8) lays out the elements of the genre and tells you which if any are mandatory. This particular one even defines some of those elements for you. It’s much more controlling, but also in some ways easier to respond to.

How do I approach this prompt?

If you’ve got detailed instructions, it’s pretty easy, so we won’t address that very much in this post. If you don’t, and your genre is just a word? Let’s dive in.

Identify the type of genre and its elements

Like we’ve said repeatedly, some genres are defined entirely by the way the story is written, not what’s in it. If voice, vocabulary, or organization is the critical identifying thing in your prompt, you’ve got a style-based prompt. If it’s no longer 2021, you should definitely check out the links at the bottom of this page and then jump to the post on style-based genres. If it’s a prompt defined by “these things need to be in this story” then you’re in the right place.

What are “things that need to be in a story?”

• types of characters
  • detective
  • animal
  • child
  • magical being
  • alien
• settings
  • future
  • past
  • specific location
• concepts
  • science
  • magic
  • love
  • family
• Objects
  • technology
    • robots
    • spaceships
    • steam engines
  • magic item
  • quest item
• Plot elements
  • meet-cute
  • denouement
  • locked room

Obviously, most element-based genres will require you to come up with more than one of these things. Some element-based genres have several core elements and a halo of optional ones. Others have a sort of sliding scale of elements which at some point reach critical mass and you’re definitely in the genre. Almost all have one or two mandatory elements that, if not included, mean that you’re definitely not in the genre.

If your prompt lists mandatory elements, great, you’re most of the way there. But if the promptwriter leaves you to unpack what those might be, you’re going to have to come up with that list yourself. Here’s how our editors do it.

Examples

Look, some people learn well in the abstract, but we’ve always found it easier to have concrete examples to learn from. So let’s unpack two genres–one likely to be familiar and one probably less-so, although we’re not going to judge you for which is which.

Romantic Comedy

Romantic Comedies, or romcoms, are a staple of the US movie industry. Okay, and of transformative works. But what would you do if you hated romcoms (looking at you, Rowan) and then drew that genre for a competition prompt? Assuming you haven’t watched a romcom since John Cusack was a thing, here’s how you’d go about preparing yourself to write.

First, do a quick internet search for your genre. For romantic comedy, this mostly yields a bunch of lists of romantic comedies. Since you probably don’t have time to watch everything on Rotten Tomatoes’ listicle of the 200 greatest romcoms of all time, this isn’t useful to you… yet. We’ll come back to it, though, so don’t close that tab!

To narrow down the search, literally just add the word “elements.” Now you have things like Screencraft’s list of nine elements, or AMC’s “10 Elements Every Rom-Com Needs.” Once you’ve got a few lists, you can start comparing.

AMC’s 10 things

The Eccentric Best Friend
The Unexpected Love Interest
The Near Breakup
The Grand Gesture
The Happily Ever After Ending
The Ex Who Gets in the Way
The Beautiful Setting
The Concerned Parent
The Rain Scene
The Epic First Kiss

Now you can start looking for commonalities among those lists, like the best friend/sidekick, the happy ending, and the near breakup. If those elements appear on every list you’re seeing, they’re probably mandatory. Meanwhile, things that only appear on one or two lists, like the concerned parent or the beautiful setting? Those are optional. If they spark your imagination, throw them in. If they don’t, it’s probably safe to skip them.

The boring part of making a list is, as any jolly old elf will tell you, checking it twice. And it’s important to check your list twice. So this is the point where you can go back to that listicle and see how well your list matches up to the examples you know. (Or, if you’re Rowan, you outsource this since, again, your last romcom was War of the Roses and we all know how that ended.) If your mandatory elements still look mandatory and your optional elements still look optional after reviewing some classic examples in the genre, you’re ready to start writing in this genre! 

Steampunk

And now, in the words of the Bard, for something completely different.

Unlike romantic comedy, steampunk is still considered a “new” genre, with less-established rules, and fewer works. But novel (heh heh. okay, maybe the writers are getting a little punchy now) or not, it’s popular, and you’re likely to run across it as one of the -punk genres, including cyberpunk, steampunk, dieselpunk, solarpunk, and even hopepunk.

So what is it? Well, that quick search yields a Wikipedia article that defines the genre as:

Steampunk is a retrofuturistic subgenre of science fiction that incorporates technology and aesthetic designs inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery. Although its literary origins are sometimes associated with the cyberpunk genre, steampunk works are often set in an alternative history of the Victorian era or the American “Wild West”, where steam power remains in mainstream use, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power.

Steampunk most recognizably features anachronistic technologies or retrofuturistic inventions as people in the 19th century might have envisioned them — distinguishing it from Neo-Victorianism — and is likewise rooted in the era’s perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, and art. Such technologies may include fictional machines like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Other examples of steampunk contain alternative-history-style presentations of such technology as steam cannons, lighter-than-air airships, analog computers, or such digital mechanical computers as Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

An interesting thing about this definition is that it includes elements that CAN NOT be part of a steampunk work. That is, technology cannot be non-steam-based, or at least, not based in technologies popularized after the Victorian era, such as the combustion engine or microchip.

Here’s another definition – one that’s boiled down quite a bit more, although you can see how it’s the same as the Wikipedia one if you squint a little.

• Advanced technology of mechanical and/or steam power.
• Clockwork/mechanical devices and mechanisms
• Air borne transport based on some kind of air technology
• Victorian influences

You might choose to call all these things “mandatory elements” but would that be accurate? What do you point to in a story and say “that’s the Victorian influence, right there!”? 

Instead, what you’re looking at is a cumulative element. Victorian stylings for your story might be settings, home furnishings, clothing, equipment, or even language choice. The ultimate goal, however, is to have something “Victorian enough” when you’re done. And that, tragically, is a “know it when you see it” cumulative element.

Play-testing your story

Look. The ultimate test of whether your story is written in a genre is whether a reader can identify it as belonging to the genre. So this is the one where you really, really cannot skip having a beta reader. Whether you give them your (or the anthology or competition’s) list of elements of the genre and ask if they can identify each one clearly, or just pick a reader who reads a lot of things in that genre and ask if it fits with the things they know, you need another pair of eyes.

Save yourself some trouble: don’t make these common mistakes

• A genre prompt is not a challenge. This isn’t the time to see how unconventional you can make your story without getting rejected or disqualified outright. That’s for writing on your own time and your own terms. Unconventional, genre-bending or -pushing works are great! But they’re going to lose points in a competition, and if they’re too unlike the rest of the submissions for an anthology they won’t get picked. We’re not telling you how to write the best story in the world, here, we’re telling you how to write a story that responds to a prompt.
• GET THAT BETA READER.
• Seriously. Please. Re-read the definition. Especially if you’re the writer who sent in the amazing Civil War era story to a prompt that had a specific and different mandatory time period. We loved your story. It didn’t meet the definition of the genre in the prompt. (We hope you found an awesome home for it and got paid!)
• Then read the definition again and see what in your story might cause someone to think it’s not there. If you’re depending heavily on context clues to show that the story is happening in the future, rethink any references to past (past of the present, are we even making sense now?) events unless you’re really sure you’ve made them sound like the distant past. If you’re depending heavily on context clues to show that you’re on another planet, and you use terms like “the fish in the river” (which is legit, please do use ordinary words when you can) make sure you’ve either described the fish well enough to show they’re not earth fish or mentioned that the colonists use familiar words for unfamiliar things that are close enough in context.

Your turn!

Check out our weekly prompt posts and try to tell a story using the genre prompts given each week. Don’t forget to ask for help in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord if you’ve got questions—you can post a link to your draft or even a snippet of your story or essay (up to 250 words) for immediate feedback. Don’t forget to use content warnings where they’re merited, so that you can get the best and most engaged readers for the words you like to write.

What’s next?

Wondering what the year has in store? Here’s a handy roadmap!

Get out your map

Here's the general flow of this year's workshop series. You don't have to follow them in order, but you may find that one builds on the next.

September: Retellings

October: Style over Substance

November: Combination Prompts

December: Roundup

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me

About the author: