Post #1

Hi everyone.  I'm Ryan Davis, and I'm a Language, Literature and Writing major with a minor in creative writing.  I am a writer of conventional genre fiction, and I have been practicing my craft for about four years now.  Admittedly, I am rather new to my chosen profession, but I have been a fan of genre fiction and its conventions for all my life. Moreover, I also began to examine my chosen genres with a critical mind for the very first time four years ago as well.  My experience in the creative writing program has been a very mixed bag, depending largely on each professors approach to the program.  By far, my favorite was Polly Rosenwaike, and I greatly appreciated all of her advice on how to improve my fiction writing.  She was very perceptive, especially on a language level, and she was incredibly open to any kind of topic I wanted to write on.

This interest of mine in conventional genre fiction gives me a deeply rooted position when discussing genre.  I think genre labels are an incredibly helpful tool for consumers, as it helps them understand what they are going to be reading, so they know what kind of experience they may be getting.  I personally support even obscure sub-genre's and sub labels, since they allow me to make my media consumption extremely specifically tailored to what I am trying to learn about. 

There are definitely problems with some of these ideas.  I know many creators feel like they are limited by genre labels and prefer to describe their works by only the broadest of categorizations.  While I understand where this idea comes from, I personally feel like they don't quite do the harm that others often accuse them of.  Ultimately, I think genre labels are, at their core, usually a way to see what influenced the author when they were creating a work.  The more complex the set of influences are, the more complex the genre label will be, and since all art is based on influences, I do not think coming up with truly well descriptive labels in and of itself is that hard.

That said, does a genre label do a work a disservice by not accurately explaining the details of what makes a work unique?  Perhaps it can. If a creator is doing their best to make something never before attempted, then simply listing all of the influences in a row and calling that a genre probably does not do a very good job explaining why the piece is still original.  That said, I don't think that's really what a genre label is attempting to do.  A genre label, I think, is designed to help people discover a new piece of art.  Especially nowadays, in the age of Google, being able to show up in these kinds of searches is exactly what a new genre needs in order to get any exposure.  While genre labels may simplify the complexities of a piece of work, they only do so in the name of accessibility, so art may one day reach a greater audience than before.