On Genres
Fantasy, Sci-fi, and Shopping at the Storytelling Store
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It's okay if your story idea is a lot like someone else's idea. In fact, it's kind of supposed to be like that!
Fiction is organized into genres so that readers can find what they want to read next easily. If you are the mood for swords and magic and goblins, you start looking at fantasy stories. Spaceships and lasers? Science fiction. Something scary? Something romantic? Something silly? Something that feels like real life?
Think of genre like a store full of all the ideas you could put in a story, all arranged into different aisles based on how they go together, and you are walking in with an empty shopping basket. You walk through the shop picking ideas off the shelf and putting them into the basket, building your story. There's a lot of things on the shelves, but the shelves aren't infinite. And as you look down each aisle, you see all the other storytellers with their little baskets, also shopping for ideas.
But if you can only add the same sorts of things to your basket as all the other storytellers, how do you make your story unique? Well, you are all shopping in the same store, but once you take them all home you get to cook up each mixture in your own specific way. Add some unique herbs and spices and before you know it, your story tastes like something entirely new.
Also, the things you don't put in your basket also affect the final product. Walking down the Fantasy aisle and taking heroes and swords but not magic and goblins? Now you are working on a low fantasy story, and it's going to end up tasting very different than a high fantasy story that includes those ingredients.
Or, you can get wild with it, and shop from the whole store. Imagine picking spaceships and robots and aliens from the Science Fiction aisle, swords and magic and wizards from the Fantasy aisle, dog-fighting ace pilots and huge naval and infantry battles from the War aisle, gangsters and bounty hunters from the Crime and Mystery aisle, and deserts and quick-shooting cowboys from the Western aisle? Well, that crazy mix of things from nearly every part of the genre store are the ingredients for Star Wars!