06 Premium; Editing Your Novel: Identify Genre, Tropes, and Reader Expectations

The episode focuses on considering genre and tropes during the editing phase, emphasizing that revision is about editing for readers and managing their expectations rather than writing only for oneself.

Beth frames editing as refining the writer’s “instrument” and recommends support from critique partners, editors, or early readers.

Using a definition from Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid, genre is presented as a label that signals what audiences expect, and writers are encouraged to identify their umbrella genre and, if possible, sub-genres, then list expected elements.

If genre is unclear, Beth suggests examining how the story ends, offering examples (romance needs a happily-ever-after, mysteries deliver a whodunit, fantasy often centers good vs. evil with magic) and contrasting this with literary fiction that upends expectations.

A quote from Orson Scott Card underscores the “implicit contract” set early in a story and the need to resolve its primary structural tension.

Your assignment is to write down the story’s genre/sub-genres and perceived reader expectations.

Happy Editing!

Write long and prosper!

00:00 Edit for Your Readers 01:10 Find Your Genre Feel 02:35 What Genre Really Means 03:01 Reader Expectations and Tropes 04:11 Use Your Ending to Decide 05:16 When Endings Break the Rules 06:23 The Reader Contract 08:02 Assignment and Wrap Up

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Transcript

Speaker 0:00

In this episode on editing your novel, we're gonna talk about your genre and tropes. Now, you've done your assessment, hopefully, and you know where you're strong, you know where you're weak. No matter what, I really recommend that you take some time and think about the genre you're writing and the tropes that you notice that are happening in your story already. How is this gonna help you? When you edit your novel, you're editing for your readers. When we write our first draft, we edit for ourselves. And really, here, I see editing as refining our instrument, and you are the instrument. Your job is to learn how to feel when something is out of tune or out of sync or hazy So you're gonna use your strengths as a writer and fine-tune these skills. You're gonna have help. I really recommend that you have critique partners or editors or early readers, that kind of thing, and I have a later, uh, lesson on that. So start from where you are, which is you have already read lots of books, probably watched lots of movies and TV, and today you're going to look at: what is your story genre? Cause just as a reminder, this editing and rewriting phase is also a revisioning and reimagining phase where you get to deepen, strengthen, and enhance your story. And just a reminder, use all your senses to evaluate what is your genre. Use your feeling sense, your body, your emotions, your auditory sense, your visual sense, whatever are your strongest senses. So when you know your genre, you'll be able to make better story decisions. If you're not sure what your genre is, just take your initial guess. We have to start somewhere, so take your initial guess. For example, when I was working on a fantasy story, my Henrietta The Dragon Slayer series, when I was first writing and even first beginning to edit, all I knew, all I could say for sure is that I had written a fantasy story. At that point, I wasn't even able to articulate anything more than that, and that's great. So what we're looking for is what is the big category of your genre, and if you can narrow that down into subcategories or subgenre or even sub-subgenre, that's great. So let's define genre so you know what we're talking about. And I researched this. There's lots of definitions of genre. So I'm gonna use this definition that I really like from Shawn Coyne's book, Story Grid. He says, A genre is a label that tells the reader or the audience what to expect. Genres simply manage audience expectations." This is the whole theme of editing. We are now editing for our reader, so we are managing their expectations. That is our job. Now, if you know the big umbrella genre, like I knew fantasy, the next question to ask yourself and brainstorm on is, what are the reader expectations of this genre? And I recommend that you jot that down as much as you know. What are those expectations? Like I knew with a fantasy story, the kind that I had written, that it was an adventure, so people were expecting some kind of adventure; that often in adventure stories there was a kind of search for something. I learned later that that was called a MacGuffin. Often the thing that is being searched for isn't as important as the search itself and all the pressures and politics searching for that thing, and also what the main character learns along the way. So I knew all of this. I had read tons and tons and thousands of adventure, fantasy adventure stories. I was weaned on fairy tales. I knew a lot already. And as I studied this and started to think more deeply, I got even more specific. But here's a clue. If you're not sure what your genre is, think about how your story ends. If you're writing genre fiction, you are going to have a specific kinda ending. If you don't fit into any of these endings, then I'll talk about that as well. So this is what I figured out before I studied in depth what genre was. I realized that when you look at the end of your story, you can actually pretty clearly define the genre, at least the genre that you're aiming for. So you may be familiar with these endings. If the readers are wanting a happily ever after at the end, that's a romance. That has to be there. That's a romance. If readers want a whodunit or sometimes howdunit, we call those mysteries. If you are writing a story that's good versus evil in a made-up land with magic, often with themes of power, control, and what does it mean to be a good person, we call that fantasy. So that's just a start. But say you have a story that doesn't end in a typical way. It upends every single expectation, and it may even end on a cliffhanger. We tend to call those literary fiction, no matter if it has fantastical trappings or not, because readers read literary fiction often because they want to be surprised and they want to be affected emotionally in very unexpected ways. I've talked to readers. They're like, "Oh, I don't know. I want something new," and they don't read the genre. They don't read sci-fi, fantasy, romance, mystery, thriller, suspense. They read literary, and they read it for that purpose. So how does your novel end currently? Or how would you like your novel to end? Sometimes endings are very hard to write. Maybe you had an intention for the ending, but you didn't quite get there. Notice what that ending is, figure out what is the genre, and do some research if you need to. And write down everything you know about the genre you are, intending to write, meaning maybe you wrote the book and you're like, "Eh, I'm kind of there. I'm partway there." But that's okay. This is what the edits are for. We're gonna get you there. Here's another take on reader expectations, and this comes from Orson Scott Card's book, Characters and Viewpoint. And here's his quote, and notice what is similar with my earlier definition on genre: Whenever you tell a story, you make an implicit contract with the reader. Within the first few paragraphs or pages, you tell the reader implicitly what kind of story this is gonna be. The reader then knows what to expect and holds the thread of that structure throughout the tale. The rule of thumb is this: readers will expect a story to end when the first major source of structural tension is resolved. If the story begins as an idea story, the reader expects it to end when the idea is discovered, the plan unfolded. If the story begins as a milieu story, the readers will gladly follow any number of storylines of every type, letting them be resolved here and there as needed, continuing to read in order to discover more of the milieu. A story that begins with a character in an intolerable situation will not feel finished until the character is fully content or fully resigned. A story that begins with an unbalanced world will not end until the world is balanced, justified, reordered, healed, or utterly destroyed beyond hope of restoration. It's as if you begin the story by pushing a boulder off the top of a hill. No matter what else happens before the end of the story, the reader will not be satisfied until the boulder comes to rest somewhere." That's the quote, and thank you to author Kay Dacus for bringing this quote to my attention. So to circle back, I spent today's episode talking about genre. Your assignment is to write down what is your genre, and if you know it, the subgenres, and what are the reader expectations as you understand them to be. All right, that's it for this time, everyone. Happy writing and happy editing Write long and prosper.