The hierarchy of genres is based on three things: the primary character flaw the hero must overcome, the quality of the life philosophy the form expresses, and the major art/story form it explores.
KEY POINT: The idea that the mind works through story leads to another revolutionary idea about transcending genres: each major human activity is its own story form.
HORROR: Confront death and face your ghosts from the past.
ACTION: 90 percent of success is taking action.
MYTH: Seek immortality by finding your destiny in this life.
MEMOIR AND COMING-OF-AGE: Examine your life to create your true self.
SCIENCE FICTION: Make the right choices now to ensure a better future for all.
CRIME: Protect the weak and bring the guilty to justice.
COMEDY: Success comes when you strip away all facades and show others who you really are.
WESTERN: When you help others make a home, you create a civilization where everyone is free to live their best life.
GANGSTER: Don’t be enslaved by absolute power and money or you will pay the ultimate price.
FANTASY: Discover the magic in yourself that makes life itself an art form.
DETECTIVE AND THRILLER: Look for the truth and assign guilt in spite of the danger.
LOVE: Learning how to love is the key to happiness.
For me, the most revelatory part of coming to understand genres was the realization that they exist in a hierarchy of their own, or what might be called a “ladder of enlightenment.” Perhaps the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s greatest insight is that every step up the ladder of human enlightenment also reveals the flaw that holds someone back. Like sand in the oyster, that flaw is what creates the next step of growth.
The hierarchy of genres is based on three things: the primary character flaw the hero must overcome, the quality of the life philosophy the form expresses, and the major art/story form it explores.
The first and most primitive genre is Horror, the story of escaping death in this life or the next. From there, the sequence moves from least to most enlightened, from Action to Fantasy, Detective, and Love stories.
At the end of each chapter, I will explain what is missing from each genre’s life philosophy—the thing that leads us to take the next step up the ladder.
Here, then, is the genre “ladder,” with each genre’s fundamental concern:
HORROR: Religion
ACTION: Success
MYTH: The Life Process
MEMOIR AND COMING-OF-AGE: Creating the Self
SCIENCE FICTION: Science, Society, and Culture (yes, science is a story form)
CRIME: Morality and Justice
COMEDY: Manners and Morals
WESTERN: The Rise and Fall of Civilization
GANGSTER: The Corruption of Business and Politics
FANTASY: The Art of Living
DETECTIVE AND THRILLER: The Mind and the Truth
LOVE: The Art of Happiness
The following best express the techniques needed to write a great story in each genre:
HORROR/Religion: Frankenstein, A Christmas Carol, Alien, Get Out, Psycho, Ex Machina, Westworld
ACTION/Success: Mad Max: Fury Road, Die Hard, Seven Samurai, the Iliad, The Thomas Crown Affair, Rocky, The Hustler
MYTH/The Life Process: Star Wars: A New Hope, The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Black Panther, Avatar, the Odyssey
MEMOIR AND COMING-OF-AGE STORY/Creating the Self: The Liars’ Club, Into Thin Air, Moonlight, Cinema Paradiso, CODA, To Kill a Mockingbird
SCIENCE FICTION/Science, Society, and Culture: Arrival, The Matrix, Inception, Interstellar, 2001: A Space Odyssey
CRIME/Morality and Justice: Breaking Bad, The Dark Knight, The Usual Suspects, Crime and Punishment, In Bruges
COMEDY/Manners and Morals: Seinfeld, Little Miss Sunshine, Groundhog Day, Wedding Crashers
WESTERN/The Rise and Fall of Civilization: Shane, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Once Upon a Time in the West
GANGSTER/The Corruption of Business and Politics: The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Sopranos, The Great Gatsby, Mad Men, Network
FANTASY/The Art of Living: Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Big, Pleasantville, Mary Poppins, It’s a Wonderful Life, Alice in Wonderland
DETECTIVE AND THRILLER/The Mind and the Truth:- Detective: L.A. Confidential, The Collected Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, Vertigo, Knives Out, Murder on the Orient Express, Chinatown, Rashomon
- Thriller: The Silence of the Lambs, Michael Clayton, The Sixth Sense, The Conversation, Shadow of a Doubt
LOVE/The Art of Happiness: Silver Linings Playbook, 500 Days of Summer, When Harry Met Sally, The Philadelphia Story, Sideways
The Detective story is a member of one of the three major genre families: Crime. Besides Detective, this family includes Thriller, Crime, and Gangster. Crime is a trickier family of genres than Speculative Fiction or Myth because its genres are more alike. Many of their beats and techniques overlap.
Therefore, a writer is in more danger of choosing the wrong genre to execute their unique story idea.
All Detective stories begin with a mystery. The killer’s plan is the key to the entire plot because it creates the puzzle that tests the detective and the audience.
KEY POINT: The opponent does two things at the beginning of the story: (1) he commits a crime, usually a murder, and (2) he comes up with a plan to cover it up.
This step has a huge effect on the story:
It causes the unique structural flip in the Detective form: the opponent remains hidden until the end, and
It’s what makes the plot so complex and difficult to create. Although the reader follows the detective solving the case, the opponent is really driving the action. As a result, the hero’s actions uncovering the crime are typically the opposite of the opponent’s actions committing it.
This leads to one of the biggest mistakes writers make about story: they think plot is the sequence of actions where the hero chases after the goal. But this is only what the plot looks like to the reader.
KEY POINT: Plot is the grand strategy the author and the opponent use to put the hero in the worst possible trouble and trick the reader.
KEY POINT: Plot is the grand strategy the author and the opponent use to put the hero in the worst possible trouble and trick the reader.
This leads to the best plot technique, not just for writing the Detective form but for writing any story.
TECHNIQUE: The Opponent’s Plan First
Always begin by figuring out the opponent’s plan. Then you can figure out the hero’s plan to defeat him.
The Detective opponent is a kind of magician: he creates a separate reality, a separate “truth.” That’s why the key to the mystery is not what the opponent did, but how he disguises it.
The criminal must:
Create a fake alibi for himself
Know at least one other character who had motive to kill the victim
Frame one or more of those characters.
The killer doesn’t just hide something. He sends the detective in the wrong direction.
KEY POINT: The detective and killer are competing over which story is accepted. You the writer must create clues that support at least two answers: the killer and at least one other.
TECHNIQUE: The Ingenious Opponent
Make the killer’s plan ingenious. This is the foundation of a great Detective story. It must be a puzzle so complex that only a brilliant detective can figure it out.
If the murder is simple with an obvious killer, no competing suspects, no cover-up of the crime, and no red herrings to trick the detective into going in the wrong direction, the story is over before it’s barely begun.
The importance of the killer’s plan has a profound philosophical basis:
KEY POINT: In all life, deception is the way of both predator and prey. Therefore, the more deception used by both opponent and hero, the better the plot will be.
This brings up one of the most useful techniques in all of story.
TECHNIQUE: The Opponent’s Plan Determines Investigation
Once you figure out the killer’s plan, investigating the clues that lead to various suspects will become clear
DETECTIVE AND THRILLER STORY BEAT: Detective’s Ghost
Ghost is the event from the past still haunting the hero in the present.
A failing in the Detective’s past causes her intense guilt, resentment, even hatred. This ties in with the larger issue of any detective story: Who is guilty of the crime?
KEY POINT: The detective’s main motivation is to even the accounts of wrongdoing in her past, even when she is not responsible for the injustice.
Thriller is much more concerned than Detective with making a strong emotional connection between hero and opponent. Therefore:
TECHNIQUE: Weakness Matches Crime
Give the hero a ghost and weakness, both psychological and moral, that in some way matches the opponent’s crime, but is less serious.
This technique is valuable because it allows you to blur the difference between hero and criminal. It also forces the hero to make a character change while investigating the crime.
The detective’s strengths come from her archetype. She is both the searcher and the magician. Her main strengths are:
She has a brilliant mind with a precise mental process. She is always curious and lives by her wits.
She has a strong will to justice, which is the great task of the city world.
She has the ability to see things from other people’s perspective.
She can pretend to be others. In other words, she uses facade to uncover facade.
She is a loner who lives and works outside the organization. This is a strength because it gives her the freedom to investigate outside the law.
Like the cowboy, she is between lawman and outlaw. So she knows how to navigate the world of crime.
The cost of being a loner in a corporate, organized world is that she is morally tainted. She often has to take on the dirty jobs, so others look down on her. But she is also the most morally concerned of any character in the story, including the cops.
The great detective is a combination of scientist and artist. The scientist induces truth from physical clues. The artist re-creates a new reality from signs that no one else can see. This makes her the ultimate modern hero.
KEY POINT: The real subject of the scientist-artist is not the criminal but human nature.
The Detective story says that human nature never really changes, no matter how modern or advanced we get. Humanity may have experienced cultural evolution. But the essential human mind has not.
TECHNIQUE: Unique Detective
Give the detective special talents for solving mysteries.
This takes the lead character and the genre beyond procedure. It treats detective/police work as an art form. Given that there have been thousands of detectives, creating one with unique talents is a tall order.
KEY POINT: Giving your hero special investigating abilities is the best way to distinguish yourself from other writers in the form.
KEY POINT: The detective’s most serious weaknesses come from what it means to be a detective: limited point of view and lack of knowledge. She is a person whose every job begins in ignorance.
This limited point of view is compounded by emotional flaws. That’s why Detective stories are often told in “first person.” Being in the mind of the detective makes the reader feel the detective’s confusion and frustration at not knowing what is happening. This also highlights the reader’s sense that the world is full of deception, and that we often miss much of what is going on.
TECHNIQUE: The Weakness Story
Make the detective’s weakness-need an entire story of its own.
Weakness is not just something embedded in the character that hurts as she goes about her daily life. The character has created a story about her weakness that blames others and hides the flaw from her understanding.
Often this story includes the ghost. But the story covers much more than this one event. The character constructed the story a long time ago, sometimes even in childhood. When first created, it might have helped her deal with the severe situation in which she found herself. But it’s become a much bigger problem that’s hurting her now.
Some psychologists refer to this as the script. The character repeats the script over and over and gets the same bad results. This becomes a cycle of self-destruction the character may not be able to overcome.