Classifying Fiction
Classifying fiction is a lot more complicated than you might think. There are a lot of ways you can go about it and those methods tell you different things about the story you are going to be engaging with. In this article, I’m going to try to provide a simplified framework explaining how media is classified and also share a few of my own thoughts on how we should classify storytelling.
To begin with though, we should establish the different ways we actually categorise our fiction. The most obvious way to distinguish between stories (which is a word I am using interchangeably with fiction here, even if it isn’t entirely accurate to do so) is by its format - the medium it is told in. The next step down from that is to identify its genre and subgenre within that medium. Finally, after that, we can identify a target audience - the demographic the story is primarily intended for.
It seems simple enough, but already that’s three different metrics to classify fiction by and each of those metrics has many subcategorisations. So, let’s start with the big ones.
Formats and Media
Formats and media are often used somewhat interchangeably. Technically though, they are not the same thing. Format refers to the methodology by which the story is conveyed while a medium refers to the tools in which you use to do so. There is a degree of overlap, but they mean different things.
Format
In broad strokes, there are three major formats in fiction. Literature, oration and interactive media. But these classifications are extremely broad and have some issues.
Literature is any form of storytelling that is written. This, weirdly enough, includes drama (in the classical sense). Drama being used in this way means a written work that is intended to be performed - theatre, mime, film etc. Oration is storytelling that is spoken. Basically, how things like folklore and mythology were communicated before we had writing systems to note them down. Obviously, there is a lot of overlap here. Interactive Media has a lot less overlap, but it’s there too. It’s storytelling that is borne from interactions between the storyteller and the audience or by a group of equal participants. This is the group that roleplaying and videogames are a part of. It’s probably the most modern part of this trifecta.
Personally, because of the overlap between literature and oral storytelling, I would personally break things down differently. Interactive media I would leave as is. I would then remove drama from literature and merge it with oration to create a category labelled performance or performative fiction. I would also start calling drama theatre, just to avoid confusion later on. In this case, literature would be fiction that is primarily intended to be read - prose, poetry, closet drama (basically plays intended to be read not performed) as well as things like comics and written serials. Performance would, naturally, be any form of fiction that is primarily meant to be consumed through watching or listening to a performance - oral tradition, ballets, songs, film and television, audiobooks or radio dramas and classical drama/theatre - even if it begins life as a written script or similar.
Media
While format is all about how you tell a story, media is about what you tell it with. For example, theatre and film are both mediums that are a part of the drama subcategory of the literary format (or the performative one if you use my classifications instead). A video game is a medium within the interactive fiction format. Novels, novellas and novelettes are all forms of books - another type of medium in the format of literature.
Literature in particular is easily conflated and is where the overlap largely lies. The word essentially refers to any collection of writing. The written word could easily be considered a form of media in and of itself and often is. I think it’s acceptable to use the term in either context. However, it would probably be more accurate to say that various books or digital publishing methods are the media.
Genre
Categorising by genre is where things start to get a lot more complicated. While the general idea of a genre is consistent - common concepts, styles and content that groups fiction together, different formats and mediums frequently use their own sets of genres that can differ to a pretty extreme extent.
On top of that, most genres have numerous subgenres within them and sometimes even those subgenres can be further broken down. More complicated still, stories frequently (whether intentionally or not) blend multiple genres together or otherwise blur the lines between different genres. The subgenre of soft science fiction, for example, has been argued to be a further delineation within the hybrid subgenre of sci-fantasy rather than of science fiction. Magical realism can easily be considered a type of fantasy or a subgenre of literary fiction because of its tendency to focus more on character than plot.
I’ll attempt to break down the various genres within each format as best I can going forward but, because of how complex and messy this system has become, this will by no means encompass the entirety of the genres and subgenres found within any of them.
Literature
The primary forms of literature are prose and poetry. Comics also count, even if they aren’t either, but they blessedly tend to more or less follow the same genre conventions as prose.
Prose
Prose has a lot of genres and subgenres, and there can be arguments made for the existence or non-existence of several apart from various others. However, as best I can tell, the main genres are essentially: commercial fiction (often, adding to the confusion, called genre fiction), literary fiction (which is a terrible name, but not as pretentious as artistic or high fiction, so it’ll do) realism and speculative fiction.
Commercial fiction refers to stories that quite strictly focus on very specific types of content, rather than settings, themes or characters. Things like action-adventure or romance stories. It is fiction defined by what happens in the story, not where it happens or who it happens to. Naturally, it has a lot of overlap with speculative fiction as a result since these things are in no way actually independent of each other.
Literary fiction is often called artistic or high fiction because the focus is much more on the characters than the plot. They’re not devoid of plot by any means, but the focus is on the condition of the characters more than the events they experience. The plot aids in exploring the characters. This is more or less considered the more “high brow” counterpart to commercial fiction (which is generally considered stories for mass consumption). Like its counterpart, literary fiction also has a lot of crossover with speculative fiction.
Realistic fiction is exactly what it says on the tin, stories dealing with ordinary, unaugmented reality. This is the realm of historical and contemporary fiction, urban fiction and slice-of-life stories. This is also where you might find a lot of crime stories or more grounded horror stories.
Speculative fiction, on the other hand, is a much broader genre with numerous subgenres with exponentially more delineations of their own. This is where stories that ask “what if?” go - stories about things that don’t exist and imagining worlds where they do. Fantasy, science fiction, dystopia and utopia, supernatural horror etc etc.
To be quite frank, I actually think we can do away with the literary label. Not only is it just a confusing term to work with, I don’t particularly like dividing books into commercial or literary fiction. I say this even as someone who is arguably a literary fiction author and who strongly believes characters are more important than plot. Regardless of that belief, there is no story devoid of either plot or characters. This feels like a pointless divide purely for the sake of decrying the artistic merrit of some works while artificially elevating that of others (just look at the other terms for literary fiction!). I only bring these two distinctions up at all because they are terms that are very prevalent in literary criticism and marketing and because literary fiction in particular is frequently treated as a genre in its own right.
I think the other two categories - realistic and speculative - are far more important than commercial and literary. Although, I think a lot of the subgenres of commercial fiction are actually much more useful than the supergenre itself. In fact, those same labels are even often applied to literary titles anyway because, as it turns out, people do like to know what kind of content is going to be in the stories they pick up. That is the entire point of genre after all. So, in my opinion, commercial and literary fiction can be merged into those categories. Those categories can then continue to serve their purpose of further explaining the content found in different realistic or speculative titles.
Poetry
Amusingly enough, poetry is also largely split into two categories in a similar way to how prose is frequently divided into commercial and literary. However, poetry does it a little differently and in a way that is more functional than about creating a false hierarchy.
The first type of poetry is narrative poetry. That is, essentially, poetry that has a plot. It tells a story with characters and a beginning, middle and end. It is similar to prose, in that sense. The main difference is that it is still told in verse with a specific meter or structure, even if it doesn't necessarily rhyme. Narrative poetry doesn’t have overly many subgenres, but it’s where you would class long epics dealing with grand figures and great deads. It is also where you would find epyllions which are shorter and explore how characters relate to themes and novels in verse or prose poems (this is also a confusing term and could arguably just be its own category, but I think it belongs here) - which are more modern equivalents that essentially tell a complete story using poetic text.
The counterpart to prose poetry is lyric poetry. There are many different forms of lyric poetry but they are generally united by a much stronger focus on structure than narrative poetry with a very defined metre and often (but not always) a rhyme scheme. They also often have more emphasis on feelings and themes than on telling a traditionally structured story. Elegy’s, poems deeply reflecting on specific concepts or events, odes that wax poetic and glorify specific people, events and Haikus are all forms of lyric poetry.
Rather annoyingly though, it seems to me that there is a lot of overlap between narrative and lyric poetry to the point where I question the purpose of dividing them at all. This is probably because narrative poetry as a classification is more about what the poem is saying while lyric poetry is more about the structure of the poem. The two don’t actually feel counter to or distinct from one another the way prose genres do. It seems to me that any given poem could very easily be both simultaneously.
I think a better way to define poetry is to separate focus and structure as different ways of classifying them. In my mind a poem is either emotive/evocative or narrative depending on whether or not it is focused on conveying a specific idea or feeling or whether it is telling a conventional story. A poem is either lyrical or free-verse depending on if it follows a defined structure or not. Then your genres become emotive/evocative lyric, emotive/evocative free-verse, narrative lyrical and narrative free verse. This just feels like a much more comprehensive and clear way of doing things to me.
Performance
Given the immense variety of things my category of performance can be, I’m going to have to elect not to talk about some things here. For starters, we’re going to be ruling out audiobooks since they share their genres with their written equivalents and we have covered that plenty. Dance and music will also be omitted because those genres are primarily about structure rather than anything to do with storytelling. Although ballet and opera do deserve at least some acknowledgement as distinct mediums through which stories have historically been told compared to other forms of dance or music. Opera is, after all, pretty much the progenitor of musical theatre. It’s not that other dance or music can’t or doesn’t tell stories, they just aren’t generally defined by storytelling in the same way.
Instead, for the purposes of this article, I will primarily be dividing performance into the categories of theatre and film and television. I know I said earlier that film and television is a derivative of classical drama and I do still genuinely believe that, but we genre film very differently and I don’t think we need to be using the word drama in a million different ways.
Theatre
Traditionally, theatre is divided into two main categories - comedy and tragedy. This division is a tradition that dates back to Ancient Greek dramas (in that context, drama was basically all theatre). Later years would also introduce the concept of a morality play - a play that teaches a moral lesson through conflict between two personified moral opposites, usually through their influence on a neutral party. Others would also later argue that historical theatre is a third or fourth main genre.
That leaves us with stories that are funny, stories about suffering, moral parables and retellings of historical events (sometimes accurate, sometimes highly fictionalised). Each of these does also have their own subgenres such as satire for comedy or melodrama for drama. There’s also the concept of the tragicomedy which combines the traits of its namesakes into a singular thing. Personally, even with subgenres factored in; I find this framework to be plenty accurate, but also very broad. Arguably too broad.
It’s a system that gives you the widest definition of what you may experience, but says little about the content beyond that. While I think you can probably categorise most theatre into these genres, I can’t help but feel like there are plenty of stories that don’t fit into them. There are bound to be stories that are contemporary and designed neither to be tragic nor humorous and that are based in reality not discussions of morality. What about musical theatre? It could be easily classified into any of those depending on the story but it also feels distinctly like its own thing. What about weird fringe plays that don’t fit into anything really? However, I don’t have any suggestions for how to refine this system without overhauling it entirely. Arguably, it’s fine as is. Personally though, I would prefer it if theatrical genres were more akin to literature or film - telling you about the content more than how they’d make you feel.
Film and Television
Arguably, more than any other format in fiction, film and TV define their genres the most by the content of the media you are consuming. In fact, these genres are almost entirely defined by their common trends, tropes and themes. Regardless of if you’re sitting in a cinema or tuning in to binge the newest big thing on Netflix, chances are high you have a pretty good idea of what you’re in for based on the genre label of the media you are consuming.
Much like with literature, there are numerous genres and subgenres that get progressively more specific. Blending genres together into new forms, to highlight the contrast between them for effect, is also very common in this format. I would suggest though, that the broadest genres of fiction in film and television are quite similar to literature: comedy, drama/realism and speculative fiction (typically in the form of fantasy, science fiction or supernatural horror).
Personally, I think this might be my favourite genre classification system. It doesn’t have the same amount of detail as the way we classify genres in literature, but it is simple and streamlined and tells an audience exactly the information they need going into a piece of media, in easy to understand language.
Interactive Media
Interactive media is a very broad and often experimental format of storytelling. There aren’t a lot of mediums within it with the consistency or popularity to really have developed a strong sense of genre to sort things into to begin with. The two mediums here that are the most prevalent today are roleplaying and video games. The former comes in a lot of different flavours but generally trends towards using labels akin to the system we used for film and TV, focusing on the content itself. The latter, however, is where things start to get weird. So, that’s where I’ll be focusing my attention.
Video Games
Although the first functional video game actually dates back prior to roleplaying games as we probably think of them now, various forms of formalised roleplay have existed since the early 1900s if not before. So, I think it is safe to say that video games are definitely the most modern medium we use to explore fiction. Video games also have the most distinctive genre system of the bunch.
Unlike the other examples I have given you, which at least to an extent are defined by the content of the media itself, video game genres are not defined by what is in the media but by how you interact with it. That is to say, genre isn’t determined by story, setting or even something as vague as mood; video game genre is about the mechanics of the game.
A platformer is all about making a character run, jump and climb on or over various obstacles in order to reach the end goal. A survival game is about managing dwindling resources and avoiding environmental hazards in order to keep your character alive. A shooter is about… well shooting things. Gaming is a sprawling titan of an industry that is constantly innovating, so there’s a plethora of different genres like this with new genres, subgenres and hybrid genres popping up all the time. But they all have the common trait of being defined by the function of the game rather than the type of fiction it actually is.
From an analytical or academic standpoint; this creates a comparatively strange situation where two games that have nothing in common in terms of aesthetics, characters, mood, plot, setting or themes can be a part of the same genre. As an example of just how outlandish this can get, Super Mario (which I’m sure we are all at least somewhat familiar with) technically shares its genre with Limbo. One is a goofy jaunt about a plumber saving a princess from a turtle, one magic mushroom at a time. The other is about a powerless child navigating a bleak, extremely violent hellscape and dying in gruesome ways as he attempts to locate his missing sibling. But both are about jumping from platform to platform, so they’re the same genre. Splatoon is about throwing paint at people and Call of Duty is about actual war, but they’re both types of shooter. When you look at it like that, it sounds a little absurd.
Weirdly enough though, in the context of gaming specifically, this works. A lot of games aren’t very narratively focused at all - to the point where a lot of game genres are defined by being story-focused over heavily about mechanics. So in a medium that ranges from no story at all to “basically an interactive movie”, it makes sense to classify things by the way you engage with the media rather than by something like the setting it takes place in. Especially when the entire medium is defined by being deeply interactive.
So, despite my criticism of poetry and theatre genres not telling the audience enough about the content of the story, I think this is probably the correct way to genre video games. Just another way this medium stands out as being quite unique among other major storytelling methods, I suppose.
Target Audience
Historically, I have been a big proponent of writing the story you want to write and then figuring out who the story is appropriate for after the fact. However, this doesn’t mean I have an issue with the concept of a target audience at all. In some ways, this is one of the most useful metrics for classifying fiction because it is quite literally about determining who the story is even for to begin with.
Technically speaking, there’s a lot of demographics that could constitute a target audience based on anything from gender, to racial identity to lived experiences. However, by far, the biggest factor in determining target audience is age. There is a very big difference in the type of media that is appropriate for a child to consume or an adult. There’s even very big differences for different stages of childhood. A young adult novel about a dragon is going to be very different to a picture book about a dragon aimed at five-year-olds.
Naturally, this means that a lot of fiction is classified and marketed according to the age of the target audience instead of, or in addition to, by genre. In literature, this is generally done using the categories of children’s books (0-12), middle grade (8-12), young adult (12-18) and adult (18+). Sometimes you might also see “new adult”, which is aimed at 18-30 year olds as a bridge between YA and adult fiction. This is by no means a perfect system though. For starters, there is an enormous amount of variation in the average linguistic complexity and thematic maturity that the different age groups found within the children’s literature and middle grade categories can handle - even before counting natural divergences in the ability and maturity of individual children. On top of that, roughly half of the people reading YA stories are adults which has caused skewed perceptions and a lot of debate over what content is actually appropriate for that bracket. These categories work fine as loose guidelines, but are by no means a comprehensive way of breaking down the age demographics stories are most suited towards. I can’t help but wonder if this is why I see a lot less talk of these specific age categories on the Australian market compared to the US/international side of publishing.
Similarly; most places have some sort of advisory system for film, television and video games as well. Here in Australia, we have General (G), Parental Guidance (PG) and Mature (M) as well as the formally restricted Mature Accompanied (MA) and Restricted (R). We also have an additional X, which is essentially content that is pornographic in nature. In the US, they use the similar system of G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17. These classifications typically come not just with these labels, but also with brief lists of the type of content the label implies and notes on whether or not the content is legally restricted or purely advisory.
I don’t think that this is a perfect system either, simply because it tends to lowball how capable of handling certain forms of content different age brackets actually are. However, I think that literature could possibly benefit from adopting a system more in-line with how we classify film, television and video games than the extremely broad categories we currently use that say little about what sort of content you are actually liable to find in a story.
Conclusion
There are an abundance of ways we can classify and sort our fiction in order to figure out who it is for and it is important that we have these systems in place, for convenience if anything. And while the systems we have are far from perfect and could certainly be improved upon, I don’t think we’ll ever really find a perfect framework for doing this. Fiction is too broad and trying to comprehensively define things into neat little boxes with no outliers and no blurred lines is just never going to work. Hell, even this article is written from an extremely westernised perspective. Other cultures have entirely different ways of classifying their media.
I started writing this article not out of some burning desire to tear down our current systems of classification, but because I found it an interesting topic. As a writer, I have often struggled to figure out how I want to classify and define my creations for the sake of my audience. It got me thinking about how complex and interesting this branch of study actually is. So I wanted to really dive into how we compartmentalise our different forms of fiction and see where the systems succeed and fail and to theorise about what, if anything, I would do differently.
In reality, this is just scratching the surface of it all. I could probably have written three times as long an article just on the various sub-genres of speculative fiction if I really wanted to get into the weeds. Hopefully though, this has proven as helpful and informative for you as the journey in putting it together has proved fascinating for me.
