Copyright 2001 by Kathleen King

Chapter Six
Genre, Form, and Content

Traditional genres include tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric and pastoral.  Tragedy focuses on the inevitable doom of human beings either through character flaw or destiny, while comedy centers on humor and happy outcomes.  Epics are adventure tales with high-born heroes who progress nobly through episodes in the history of a culture.  Brief poems which use images and sound to summarize a moment, lyrics utilize rhythm and verse structures to produce a unified effect.  Pastorals focus on the lives of country folk.

The modern understanding of genre includes these ancient categories, but more often fits writing into categories such as poetry, essay, and fiction, a large category which subdivides further into novel, short story, drama, television play, and movie scenario.  The concept of genre has become so complex and difficult to understand because the term also refers to numerous subdivisions of the major categories; for instance, the large category of novel includes detective novels, historical novels, romance novels, western novels, science fiction novels, and gothic novels.  Each of these smaller categories fits within the general category, but adds specific requirements of form and subject.  Example 6.1 illustrates some of the confusion and looseness which complicates attempts to pin down a definition of genre.

Form and content are two qualities which together determine what genre a piece of writing belongs to.  Most genres require specific combinations of structure and idea.  For instance, an epic poem requires a form which includes elevated style, episodic adventures, and a content centered on historically pivotal events and characters.  A detective novel requires an entirely different form, the logical assembly of clues, as well as a different content, solving a crime.

Form refers to the arrangement of the various elements of a piece of writing, the shape of the writing rather than the content.  For instance, poetic form often utilizes stanzas, a division of verses into parts.  However, poets also work with the form of images, the arrangement and interaction of images in a work, and the form of ideas, the structure and movement of thoughts in a poem.

The long-lasting debate about the relationship of form and content, which began with the Greek philosopher Plato and his student Aristotle, continues into our own time.  Writers and philosophers tend to line up in two camps:  those who separate form from content and those who stress the inseparability of structure and idea.  Plato belongs to the first category, and he emphasizes the importance of content, pointing out the dangers of poetry, the need to apply external moral standards to content, and the obligation to expel from the city those poets who write about less-than-noble subjects.  Aristotle provides us with the first logical classification of genres, emphasizing the importance of plot as an organizing factor, and the tying together of events and structure to produce meaningful writing.

Until the 1920s, literary critics acknowledged the interaction of form and idea, but the Marxist literary critics and later the Russian formalists began to emphasize structure over subject matter.  Form became the most accurate means to understanding the content of writing.  Then a brief movement in the other direction occurred:  content became more important than shape.  After a long period of relative peace, in which writers and critics settled down to study the relationship between form and idea, the deconstructionists arose to shift the focus once again to structural relationships.  However, many writers and critics agree that form and content grow together as a piece of writing develops.

Form can be divided into two basic types.  Conventional forms follow the rules, or conventions, of a genre and can be viewed as bags into which the writer pours ideas.  Organic forms take shape through a process of growth and are more like clay which the writer sculpts.

If you decide to write a horror story, for example, the form is to some extent decided beforehand.   The writer knows which rules to follow and imposes a form on ideas which in turn reshape the form.  However, when a short story about the war in Vietnam surprises the writer by veering sharply from the intended course and turning into a poem, the writer observes as ideas harness form to their will.  For instance, "War Mother" uses a comparison and contrast form derived from the subject of the parallel lives of a mother and her soldier son

          War Mother
At evening her sky glows soft rose,
but over his head thunderheads purple.
She mixes banana bread
while he gnaws beef jerky.
The kitchen fills with sweetness.
She turns on the radio,
Grand Old Opry fiddles
while he plugs a Jimi Hendrix
cassette into his boom box.
A blue parakeet whistles in the corner.
She refills the seed cup.
He peels an orange
throws the rind to a monkey
come down from a treetop.
She smoothes a hand down her seersucker dress,
telephones Agnes next door to come play Canasta.
He rolls up khaki sleeves,
pulls a chair up to the poker table.
Late night she reads the new book club novel,
and he checks out a centerfold beauty.
She brews a cup of black tea,
sits down to write her son a letter.
He pours a shot of whiskey,
knocks it back,
picks up a pencil stub,
and writes dear mom on a postcard.
Her gentle basset face clears
as she thinks of her son,
but he is a dog gone wild
and skinny in the jungle.

The French poet Paul Valery believed this relationship between form and content to be a kind of symmetry, and wrote that when such interaction occurs, it makes "of the poet a kind of temporary medium".  When idea and structure develop together, they take on a life of their own, sometimes disregarding entirely the wishes of the writer.  Cleanth Brooks, a New Critic, described content as the problem and form as the solution.  As you write, you will learn to treat your ideas like runaway horses:  give them their heads and let them go.  Then look back at what you have written and emphasize the patterns which the combination of idea and form have made.  A beginning poet decided to write a sonnet, a complex type of poetry with specific requirements of idea and structure.  Example 6.3 shows the type of verse he produced.

(The conventional form known as the Shakespearean sonnet consists of iambic pentameter lines, arranged in three quatrains followed by a rhyming couplet, with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg.  Each quatrain introduces an image, and the final couplet ties together and sums up the meaning of the images.)

           A Trip to Seattle

I wanted to go for a ride in my car (11)
to get on the highway and give it some zip (11)
to see the big world and to go so far  (10)
to travel along at a pretty good clip. (11)
A milky way candy bar made a good treat (11)
on the Oregon coast I ate every day fish (12)
tramped on the beach and blistered my feet (9)
but never once did I have to wash a dish. (11)
The town of Seattle I liked really well (11)
although for my visit it often did rain (11)
I went to a bookstore where novels they sell (10)
the weather did cause me in knowledge to gain. (11)
And so my dear friend, if ever you travel (11)
don't allow weather to make you unravel. (11)

 

This cliché verse utilizes the rhyme scheme of a sonnet, but the lines are not iambic pentameter (ten syllables with a stress pattern like this:  -'-'-'-'-' ) and the quatrains do not lead to a unified series of images.  The writer believed that making a sonnet was easy, that he could sit down and in a few minutes turn out a priceless poem.  Instead, he produced a slightly humorous verse, but a poor attempt at crafting a sonnet.  A better way would have been to write down a rich series of images about the trip, then shape and reshape them into an organic whole.  "Change of Season" began when the poet noticed a change in the weather, and as the words arranged and rearranged themselves on the page, the writer watched as an organic whole emerged.

           Change of Season
                 Autumn Equinox 1991
This afternoon I walk out to the mailbox
carrying a letter stamped and addressed to you.
Dusty smell of arrowleaf balsamroot blows down
from the flanks of mountains and Scout Mountain
bears a cap of lenticular cloud.
Last weekend autumn
rolled in across the valley of Pebble Creek
with two days of rain, hail inches deep on the mud.
All the beaver ponds filled up, campsites emptied
near aspens, gray trunks carved with names and dates
Vitalio Gonzalez 1989   Julio Antonio Ortiz 1978.
Basque sheepherders summered there.
I walk toward home
through low-angled light of almost equinox.  Enfolded
by mountains my quiet seasons come and go, old-fashioned
patterns:  dry season and wet, the warm and the cold.
Today is the season of the smell of arrowleaf balsamroot.

But how did the writer know this idea was a poem and not a short story or novel or essay?  One clue may be plot size, the amount of tension generated by certain events.  In general, size of plot and length of writing have some correspondence.

Now look at Example 6.8,, which shows what happens when the writer packs too much excitement into too small a space:  the result is a toothpick which jabs the reader uncomfortably.  Unless the writer works with exceptional skill, a small piece of writing cannot hold a great deal of tension.

On the other hand, longer pieces require a subject which develops more tension and winds the tangled threads of the plot tighter.  Too little tension, as in a novel about fifteen minutes in the life of the average garden snail might look like Example 6.9.

The turning point of this plot occurs when rain begins and the snail has to move up a bit in the shell to keep from getting wet, but the rain slacks off right away and things go back to normal.

As you write, let your ideas take on their own shape.  People talking to each other?  Probably a short story, novel, or play.  A brief moment of great beauty or insight?  More likely a poem.  Your sudden understanding of the importance of quilting to your grandmother?  Short story if you want to fictionalize, personal essay if you tell it straight.  Draw a diagram of your idea.  How much tension does the idea have?  Then distribute that amount of tension over an appropriate distance and you'll have some idea of what genre is appropriate.

The story which follows, "The Man Who Would Eat Grass," grew from reading a newspaper article about a man in China who ate only grass.  The first setting of the story was China, but because the writer had no direct knowledge of that country, the story moved to that favorite small-town setting River City.  As you read, think about why this idea made itself into a story rather than a poem, play, novel, or essay.

The Man Who Would Eat Grass

When I retired, we put in twice as big a garden as before.   Keeps an old man busy, but we always did like our vegetables.  The grass business started on one of those warm spring days after the last cold spell, the kind of day when birds flap around with bits of straw and string in their beaks, when the grass starts to get long and wiffle a bit in the breeze.  I hoed around the snowpeas which raised tiny green leaves along the south edge of the garden.  You plant snowpeas early, you got something to eat with the radishes and lettuce in June.

Just at the northwest corner of the garden, a big, bushy clump of grass set my mouth to watering, so green and shiny.  I stopped hoeing.  The wind lifted the little grass blades, like wind blowing soft hairs back from the face of a beautiful woman.  I dropped the hoe right there in the dirt, walked over, grabbed a blade, and chewed it up.  Sour, downright puckering, but good.  I ate a handful, then finished my hoeing.  Before I went in for lunch, I yanked out another handful of grass to take along.  The juice ran across my hand, cool and sticky.

Martha was in the kitchen, cooking up something special.  Since we retired, we eat good.  Of course, we both gained a little weight, but we was skinny to start with.  Last fall I painted the kitchen yellow and white while Martha sewed the ruffly yellow and white checked curtains.  Sun was just shining in at the window, across the counter, and down onto the floor.  Why, the whole room felt warm and bright.

I admired Martha's behind under that blue dress she wears so often because it's my favorite.  She turned around, big wooden spoon in her hand, and brushed a strand of curly gray hair back off her forehead.

"Soup's almost ready," she said.

And I could smell it, rich vegetables, cabbage, carrots,  celery, all in chicken stock.  I took a deep breath.

"What's that in your hand?"  Martha pointed her spoon.

I looked down at my left hand, a bit muddied across the  knuckles, clasping the bright green bunch of grass.  "Salad."  I held it out to her.  "Figured you could cut it in little pieces, maybe dress it with some mayonnaise."

Martha raised her eyebrows, tilted her head to one side.  "Eat grass?  Why George, I never heard of that."

"Indians used to do it."  I felt a little guilty about my fib, worried Martha might refuse to fix the salad.  And I craved it by now.  Some of that vegetable soup, a peanut butter  sandwich, and a nice grass salad.

Martha made the salad all right, sliced up a little tomato in it, tasted real good.  I ate two bowls full.

After that, we had grass salad right along into summer.  Martha ate more of the lettuce and collard greens from the garden, but I stuck with the grass, started to eat it both lunch and dinner.  Instead of shaving the whole lawn every time I mowed, I left a long patch out by the back fence where the neighbors wouldn't mind.  Kept the weeds out of it, just the nice grass bushing up.

One day our neighbor Harvey Jensen saw me picking weeds out of the long grass.

"What's that crop you got there?  Hay?"  Harv is a retired  farmer, fat from a lifetime of eating beef.  He waddled up to the  fence.

I pretended not to hear.  Sometimes when you get old you can fake being deaf.  Selective deafness, Martha calls it.

"You raising seed grass there, or what?"  Harv asked.  He leaned on the fence, forearms bulging under the rolled-up sleeves of his work shirt.

When he laid a spit of tobacco juice on my side of the fence, I couldn't ignore him any more.  "Harv, how you doing?"  I kept weeding.  Grass gets weeds, too, and some of them don't taste so good.  "Just seeing how the grass grows," I said.

"Oh, an experiment, like at agriculture school."  Harvey was  satisfied.

Then I got to wondering how different varieties of grass would taste.  The next time I drove Martha to the supermarket in River City, we stopped at K-Mart on the way home.  They had seed for soft, springy grass, and some bushy green kind.  There was even one type that doesn't turn brown in summer, which came in handy later.

After a month or so, I had nice stripes of grass all down the back end of my garden and told everybody I wanted to see what grew best where.  The shade grass burned up and got brown right away because the garden is so sunny, but the rest did real good.  I watered the garden every day.

The trouble didn't start until the weather turned hot and dry in August.  Most of the grass browned up and went dormant.  By this time I was eating a mixing bowl of grass with every meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  But the brown grass didn't taste right.  I watered my garden day and night, but it was getting up over a hundred degrees every day, cooling off to ninety-five at night, and I couldn't keep the ground wet.  Only the drought-resistant strain kept growing, and it was tough, didn't have much flavor.

Pretty soon, I cut my grass back to two bowls a day, then one.  Martha was the first to notice my bad temper.

"Hi, honey," she called out when she heard my boots on the back stairs one day toward the end of August.  "Lunch is almost ready.  Your favorite vegetable in a nice little salad with tomatoes and onions.  Some sardines in mustard sauce.  And saltines."

When she turned around, I saw that crummy little bowl of grass in her hand, and it made me mad.  Here the woman had gone and mixed up my grass with tomatoes and onions to stretch it, make it seem like I was getting more.  You have to understand how it was for me without the grass.

I slapped the bowl with my hand and yelled.  "Don't you  know I like my grass straight?"  The bowl fell, skidded across the floor, bits of grass, tomato, and onion flying out everywhere.  I pushed my face right up against Martha's and narrowed my eyes.  "Don't you ever do that to me again."

Martha's eyes opened wide and her mouth made an 0.  She'd never seen me like that in forty-five years of marriage.  "George, what are you saying?"  She bent to pick up the thin wisps of grass, clicked  her tongue at the mayonnaise clotted on the floor.
"Honestly, George Weston, sometimes I don't understand you at all.

A month later the rains started, the grass greened and plumped up, and we both forgot my bad moods.  Only thing was, now I had to get up and eat a salad in the middle of the night besides the ones at meals and bedtime.  The craving woke me, felt like a hole boring from my front to my back.  I kept grass in the refrigerator all the time.   Tried drying and baling it like hay, but just like in summer, the dry stuff didn't taste good.

When frost hit, the grass started to die.  At first it wasn't too bad.  Big clumps still bushed up at fence corners.  I  snuck outside just after dawn and walked around our neighborhood between houses and down alleys stuffing a pillowcase full of freshly picked grass.  But it got harder to find.  I started to lose weight, and Martha worried.

"George," she said one morning as she put the steaming coffee pot on the table.  "I want to talk with you."  She set out two yellow cups.

I poured, then sipped, not meeting Martha's eyes.

"You're losing weight."  Her statement was firm.

"I've been on a diet."

"Yes, a weight-gain diet.  I've baked cakes and pies every day, mixed milkshakes and eggnogs every night.  And still you lose weight." She set her cup down, laid her warm hand on mine, and looked into my eyes.  "George, how much grass can one man eat?"

I looked down at her soft skin and the carefully manicured nails.  Her perfume smelled so good, fresh and green.  "It tastes good to me."  I pulled my hand out from under hers, grabbed the coffee pot, and poured each of us a full cup.  "Besides, vitamins are good for us old folks."

When snow came, the grass disappeared, just like that,  overnight.  I nearly went crazy.  Every day I craved grass worse, and yet there was none.  We spent a fortune on spinach and bok choy, but they didn't hold me.  My weight dropped fast, and after a week I had to hold onto the wall with one hand to walk.

Martha drove me to River City to see Doc.  He examined me,  listened to the ticker, then pulled down my bottom lip and looked at the inside of it.

"You look a little greenish, George."

I hadn't noticed any green color, but something told me Doc  wouldn't understand about the grass, so I kept quiet.

"Been eating enough vegetables lately?"  He grinned.

Doc sent me to the university hospital.  Those guys puzzled over me a few days, and then I started to throw up.  Their meals was okay, I guess, nothing like Martha's of course, but they only gave me a little bowl of salad, lettuce all limp and slimy in dressing.  Why, I couldn't eat anything like that.

Finally the sickness got so bad they figured I'd die.

Martha stood by my bed and held my hand, tears shiny in her eyes.  "Don't die, honey, please don't die."  She snuffled, then wiped the back of her free hand across her eyes.  "George, tell them about the grass.  Remember how you got last summer when you couldn't get enough?  And now you're not eating any grass at all and you're dying.  I don't want to spend the rest of my life alone, George."

I wasn't quite ready to die, so Martha called all the docs in, and they stood around my bed like white-coated vultures while I told the story.  The young ones wrote down what I said while the old guy asked questions.  When he finished, they went behind the curtain to whisper.  Selective deafness came in handy.

"What we have here, gentlemen. . ."  It was the old one talking.  ". . .is an old-fashioned case of pica."

One of the young fellows piped up.  "But don't people with  pica eat dirt?"

"Some have a fondness for clay, yes, and others for laundry  starch, pregnant women especially.  The constant chewing of ice cubes represents a milder form."

"And this is a deficiency disease?"

"We think so, although we've never proved conclusively what's lacking in the system.  Some vitamin or mineral, probably."

The doctor ordered grass flown in from down south, Florida.  It wasn't as fresh as what I'd picked in my own yard, but I stopped throwing up the first day, and gradually got stronger, until by the tenth day I could walk a good mile going around and around the hospital corridors.  The old doctor caught up with me that afternoon, puffing a bit as he matched my pace.

"You're ready for discharge, George."  Sweat beaded on his  forehead, and gray bags hung under his eyes.  "But you'll have to  move to a warmer climate."

Suddenly, clear as can be, I thought of palm trees, fluffy  patches of bright green grass sticking up next to the trunks.   "To Florida," I said.

"Good as anywhere.  All you need is a steady supply of grass, and your body will do the rest."

Martha and I flew to Florida, stayed in a motel at Daytona Beach the rest of the winter.  Plenty of fresh grass.  The middle of April we rented a car and started back north, stopping along the way to sample the local grasses.  Let me tell you, some of that roadside grass is great, but some is so woody you can hardly chew it.

I'm still thin, but I feel real good now.  This fall we'll  follow the rains to Florida.  Green grass down there all year, and I got an urge to try some of that bushy palmetto scrub.

Because this plot involved a number of events and traced the development of George's addiction to grass from the first craving, through withdrawal which nearly led to his death, to an appropriate solution to the problem, the idea grew into a short story.  The content was not big enough to support the length of a novel, but needed more room for development than a poem provides.  Contrast the content of "The Man Who Would Eat Grass" with the content of Lisa Smith's poem "Duration" in Example 6.10 below.  Why did Lisa's idea become a poem and not a story?

                                                        Duration

Daydreaming I trudge behind him
Moving towards the horizon
Burrs grab our socks and pants
Refusing to let go.
It is autumn, now, in Idaho
Yet the sun clings to the sky
Warming the colored landscape
And long walks on mountain trails
Are still a pleasure.
We reach the woods, a cool breeze blows
We rest beneath a canopy of gold
Serenaded by rustling aspen leaves
Engulfed by dying summer.
Filtered sunlight leaks from above
Beams of white and gray shine
Contrast on the forest floor
A change of season.

As you try out your writing ideas on the page, you will learn how to fit form and content into seamless beauty.  The journal entry for this chapter will help you practice fitting content and idea into a genre.  Draw the diagrams requested in Part A first.  Some will be easier than others.  When you finish this practice in recognizing the appropriate form for an idea, go on to the second exercise.

1.  Define genre and give at least three examples of traditional genres.
2.  How does the modern understanding of genre differ from the original definition?
3.  Describe the interaction of form and content.
4.  Name the two types of form and sketch an example of each type.
5.  When you begin writing, what clues help you decide on a genre?

Read through the following ideas for writing, draw a diagram of the tension and length of each, then decide which genre the idea seems to fit.

1.  Jennifer and Christopher have been married one week.  She comes home from work and asks for a divorce.

2.  A double rainbow appears right in the middle of a rainy sunset.

3.  Hugh and Myron plot to steal a fortune in diamonds from the young and beautiful jeweler who just opened a studio on Main Street.

4.  Agnes reads the local paper, sees the obituary of her high school boyfriend's wife of fifty years, goes to the funeral, she and Barney fall in love and marry.

5.  Margaret bakes her first loaf of bread.

6.  Cecelia opens her door to a traveling salesman.

7.  A shocking series of attempted rapes unites a small town in the search for the perpetrator.

8.  The Tudwilligers and the Markersons have dinner together.

9.  You see a stray dog looking frantic and lost beside the highway at rush hour.

10. Your college freshman daughter sells her Toyota and buys a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Place your journal and a pen nearby, then get comfortable, relax, then take in a deep breath and let it out slowly, feeling the tension in your body and mind flowing out as you exhale.  Continue breathing slowly and deeply, just letting your mind go.

When you feel very relaxed and comfortable, begin to focus on the thoughts which come to mind.  As each thought comes to you, explore the following questions.  What size is the thought?  How much tension does it contain?  Does the thought seem more like a poem?  A story?  A play?  An article?   Then let each thought go and move on to the next.

After you have explored as many ideas as you wish, take a deep breath and come back to the real world.  Jot down in your journal any ideas you wish to save from this imagination exercise.

Choose one of your ideas and develop it into a piece of writing.