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.