Genre conventions are the rhyme scheme of a storyteller’s ‘poem.’ They do not inhibit creativity, they inspire it. The challenge is to keep convention but avoid cliché.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 91)
…when a style decomposes, flattens itself down into a genre, then indeed it does become a set of mannerisms and often pretty lifeless techniques.
James Woods, How Fiction Works (2018, p. 229)
Useless and harmful as a value category, genre [i.e., romance, science fiction, etc.] is a valid descriptive category. …A genre is a genre by virtue of having a field and focus of its own, its appropriate and particular tools and rules and techniques for handling the material, its traditions, and its experienced, appreciative readers.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love” (2014) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 108)
Genre seems to be a way of both organizing events and organizing the telling of them—a way that can be used for one’s own storytelling or, indeed, for ‘placing’ stories one is reading or hearing. Something in the actual text ‘triggers’ an interpretation of genre in the reader, an interpretation that then dominates the reader’s own creation of what Wolfgang Iser calls a ‘virtual text.’
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 6)
If critics and teachers gave up insisting that one kind of literature is the only one worth reading, it would free up more time for them to think about the different things novels do and how they do it, and above all, to consider why certain individual books in every genre are, have been for centuries, and will continue to be more worth reading than most others.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Le Guin’s Hypothesis” (2012)