Does Genre Dictate Format?

Recently a friend asked me why I tend to write comedies as plays, and crime drama as novels.

There are three interdependent reasons:

• My development as a writer
• The fit of form the the fiction
• Markets

My Evolution as a Writer

Early in my life, I wrote almost exclusively in narrative form. (I also wrote some bad poetry, but let’s not go there.) I wrote some short stories, scholastic pieces, and journalistic bits, all very realistic, all very structured. In writing, I reflected the styles that I read from the forms I read, and basically copied the forms I knew. I rarely if ever read plays, and even then, never for pleasure; I wasn’t a “theatre person.” Thus, it never occurred to me that I would write scripts. I saw myself as a writer. Writers wrote books. They didn’t act or develop plays.

And, what types of books? “Serious” books. Books “about” things. Things that take time to explain, be it news, novels, biographies, history, or politics. Comedies, by contrast, were short works – TV shows, humor columns, the occasional short story. Set up the joke, deliver the punch line, move on.

We are what we eat, right? By analogy, we write what we read.

Fitting Form to Fiction

This follows from how I developed as a writer. And for this I need to add an important detail.

I first took the stage in front of paying patrons a month before my 43rd birthday, doing comedy improv. From there I took up sketchwriting, then acting in decreasingly improvised plays. All of the above were comedies until 2009, almost seven years to the day since my first night performing improv. These experiences imprinted on me that stage plays were usually comedies.

It’s not accidental. Plays are shorter, very verbal, and focused. They center on characters and wordplay – right up my comedic alley. Novels, by contrast, are descriptive, moody, and plot-driven. Readers can, and often like to, get inside  the characters’ heads in ways simply not possible in plays. That bodes well for drama. A novel’s length makes comedy more difficult, as readers tire of constantly being set up for jokes.

Markets

The markets for each form help drive content as well.

Theatre audiences love comedies. (And musicals, but that’s a whole ‘nother hornet’s nest.) When they go out for a night of theatre, most love to escape for an evening of laughter rather than being moved to tears. While stage dramas have their own following, any theatre director will tell you t hat comedies outdraw dramas. Dramas win awards; comedies draw crowds. Therefore, there’s more room for comedies in their lineups.

By contrast, comedies are a tougher sell in the full-length fiction world. Lacking visual cues, narratives must labor to set up punch lines, and that’s a much tougher prospect. Plus, books require a longer personal time investment to consume. We’re more often willing to blow a couple of hours on a stage comedy (after a nice dinner with a few glasses of wine), but not ten times that amount on a book we later might view as frivolous.

Markets aren’t a driving force behind what I write, but, like form fit and personal history, help me choose which form to use when telling my story. In other words, these factors don’t determine what I write, but in what form you, the consumer, get to enjoy it.