Genre in Creative Writing Notes

Defining Genre

  • Definition: Categories of literary, musical, artistic, or other compositions.
  • Features: Distinctive forms, content, techniques, audiences, and purposes.
  • Conventions: These distinctive features specific to each genre.
  • Dynamic Nature: Genres evolve, split into sub-genres, and mix.
  • Text: Any type of cultural production (written, oral, etc.).
  • Audience: Socialized to categorize and have expectations of text types.
  • Composer: The person communicating the text.
  • Example: Text messages as a genre with constraints (written words, length) and audience considerations.
  • Unstable Genres: Genres are not fixed and change over time.

Fiction and Nonfiction

Fiction

  • Characteristics: Imaginative, symbolic qualities.
  • Audience Engagement: An act of make-believe.
  • Composer's Role: Indicate if stories are based on real events.
  • Genre Fiction: Popular fiction genres like fantasy, science fiction (SF), speculative fiction, and romance.
  • Literary Fiction: Emphasizes craft and meaning over pleasurable effects; often seen as elevated compared to genre fiction.

Nonfiction

  • Characteristics: Adherence to the actual and factual.
  • Audience Purpose: Often consumed for educational purposes.
  • Relationship with the World: Themes often provide social commentary.
  • Audience Expectation: Composers present what actually happened or is logically/philosophically coherent.
  • Complexity: As complex as fiction, with overlapping categories.
  • Key to Fine Writing: Storytelling.
  • Literary Non-Fiction/Creative Non-Fiction: Fact-based but uses fiction writing techniques.
  • Life Writing: Diaries (personal records), autobiographies (life accounts), memoirs (selective life accounts), and biographies (accounts of someone else's life).
  • Evolution of Sub-Genres: e.g., biographies of cities.

Importance of Genre for Writers

  • Audience Understanding: Helps audiences understand the text.
  • Composition Aid: Helps writers in their act of communication.
  • Convention Influence: Helps writers mimic/evolve genre conventions.
  • Reader Orientation: Writing outside conventions can disorient readers.
  • Audience and Purpose: Helps writers consider these key aspects.

Narrative Genres

  • Definition: Both fiction and creative non-fiction can be narrative genres.
  • Narrative: A story of a series of events (plot) happening to a character or characters.
  • Conventions:
    • Narrated series of events with a major dramatic question, escalating conflicts, and resolution.
    • Character/s (real or imagined).
    • Scenes showing plot points.
    • Descriptive and poetic language.
    • Theme/s: the underlying abstract idea/s explored.

Indigenous Stories of Place

  • Importance: Essential to acknowledge the relationship between narrative and place in Indigenous cultures.
  • Western Distinctions: Fiction/nonfiction don't really apply.

Songlines

  • Significance: Central to First Nations cultures for over 60,000 years.
  • Function: Carry laws and stories.
  • Interwoven: Difficult to translate for non-Indigenous people.
  • Content: Trace astronomy and geographical elements from ancient stories, shaping the landscape.
  • Early Use: Communication and mapping Country.
  • Examples: Songlines of the Seven Sisters.
  • Narrative Style: 'Tense and epic narratives.'

Country (Aboriginal English Term)

  • Definition: Specific places, Aboriginal Peoples' homelands.
  • Components: Land, waters, people, winds, animals, plants, stories, songs, and feelings.
  • Nature: Alive; cares for and communicates with people.

Colonization Impact

  • Disruption: British colonizers didn't recognize/ignored songspirals, Law, and Culture.
  • Land Claim: Claimed land already claimed by Indigenous clans with boundaries, Law, language, and culture.

Moiety

  • Definition: A complex kinship system.

Collective Storytelling

  • Western Ideas of Authorship: Challenges the individualistic notion of authorship.

Genre as Social Practice

  • Communication: An act of communication between narrators and audience, and between texts.