I Got My Story’s Genre Wrong. Twice.
And how Save the Cat Writes a Young Adult Novel helped me solve it
Accidental Notes has given me heaps of trouble, as evidenced by how much I am workshopping it and having each workshop end with, “okay, start over.”
When I originally wrote the book, I wasn’t much thinking about its genre. I had an aesthetic! Isn’t that enough?
Spoiler Alert: It was not enough.
In a lot of ways, when I originally put this story together, I wrote it as a Buddy Love. Adaya is changed because of Grayson, that much is clear in the version that exists right now. But the romance was not the plot. The plot was the plot.
So in the workshopping I’ve done so far, I’ve wondered if I should focus more on the mystery. Maybe it was a Whydunit, and I needed to strip it back to what makes mysteries tick. The last time we worked on this book, that was the conclusion I came to.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What is Buddy Love? Whydunit? Where did these terms come from? The answer is Save the Cat.
When I went over the basics of Save the Cat last year, I noted that this structure is actually a lot more nuanced than the fifteen-step beat sheet I introduced. There are actually ten genres of Save the Cat. Each of them handles the beats a little differently, and each has different required elements in addition to the fifteen standard beats. Also, they don’t line up perfectly with any one idea of what you typically think of as genre.
It’s not the genres of fantasy, contemporary, urban fantasy, sci-fi, etc. Instead, the genres are:
- Rite of Passage
- Buddy Love
- Institutionalized
- Superhero
- Golden Fleece
- Fool Triumphant
- Dude with a Problem
- Out of the Bottle
- Whydunit
- Monster in the House
A contemporary novel can be any of these. A fantasy novel can be any of these. Romances, well, those are usually Buddy Love. But not all Buddy Love stories are romances.
Confused yet?
So was I, and I teach this stuff.
At least, evidently I was confused because I couldn’t place Accidental Notes in this chart. Not when I wrote it. Not the first several times I revised it. And not even last week when I was thinking it through and kept thinking it needed to be a mystery.
Because Jessica Brody wrote a new Save the Cat book: Save the Cat Writes a Young Adult Novel. My copy arrived yesterday. The first thing I did was read the “Whydunit” chapter — the chapter for mysteries. The second thing I did was realize I hadn’t written a Whydunit. Not without a fresh body. Those plots basically require a murder. Not a mysterious object, but someone is dead and, usually, someone else is trying to blame our protagonist for the death. This is One of Us Is Lying, and All Eyes on Her, and A Study in Charlotte.
This crosses Whydunit off the list for Accidental Notes right alongside Buddy Love, since it’s clearly Adaya’s story, not one that also belongs to Grayson.
Okay, so, what is her story? Well, this is the premise I came up with for a flat arc:
Adaya returns to Bend for a funeral only to find a family frozen in time. When she learns about a family secret older than she is, her ability to improv helps her father grieve and finally learn to live again.
What matters, then, isn’t just Adaya, but the state she finds her family in when she returns there. The choices she faces are whether to join her family, reject her family, or break them free of their hold on the past.
This isn’t a Whydunit, and it’s not Buddy Love. Its genre is the same as The Giver, and Dear Martin, and An Ember in the Ashes. It’s “Institutionalized,” a genre where the main question is “to join or not to join?” And the three special requirements are:
- A group
- A choice
- A sacrifice
We have a group, all right: the Finleys. Something I wanted from the very beginning was this idea of groupthink, with Adaya’s father as the head of this group, whose actions inform the rest of them. In Institutionalized novels, this character is called the Company Man, the one who embraces the establishment and tries to get our main character to join. Is this how her father treats her? …yes.
Adaya’s choice, as the story is written, is to leave the Institution behind and return to her life with her mother. But I’ve discussed over and over that this ending wasn’t sitting right with me. I wanted her to free her family. Incidentally, freeing the group is one of the choices/sacrifices in an Institutionalized genre. So is choosing to leave forever. The markers for this genre are already there, unlike with a mystery where I would have to add them all back in.
I’ll rework my beat sheet in a future article, as well as give a review for Save the Cat Writes a Young Adult Novel. I wanted to start here — with a confession that even my own Manuscript Evaluation was wrong — for a few reasons. First, this is tricky to get right. Second, Editor Rochelle knew there was a problem with the structure, but misidentified the solution. I say all the time that editors might get answers wrong, but it’s worthwhile to dig in to where they said the biggest problems were even if you disagree with their solutions.