What genre is your book, and why it matters

Naming your genre early shapes everything after it, the structure, the voice, and how much you have to verify.

Before you write a word of the book, it helps to know what kind of book it is. Genre is the set of rules you write by, settled at the start rather than added at the end, and it decides the shape, the voice, and how much of what you write has to be true. Here are the genres a serious writer most often reaches for, and what each one asks of you.

Memoir

A memoir is one story drawn from your own life, told in your own voice. It lives on the truth of small remembered detail and on the thread you choose to follow, and it asks you to treat your memory as your account and to check the facts you can. It is the most personal of the genres, and the voice is half the book.

Biography

A biography is the life of someone else, built from the record. Where memoir runs on memory, biography runs on sources, letters, interviews and documents, and every claim should be traceable to one. It asks for patience with research and for a fair, steady voice that does not pretend to be the subject. Many family histories are biographies in all but name.

Narrative nonfiction

Narrative nonfiction tells a true story, a place, an event, a family business, with the techniques of a novel: scenes, characters, tension. It demands the research of journalism and the craft of fiction at once, and it is unforgiving of invention, since the power comes from the fact that it happened. This is the home of much of the best modern nonfiction.

Business and self-help

A business book or a self-help book is built around an idea, an argument or a method, rather than a life. The reader comes for what they can use, so structure does more work than scene, and the writer's authority and clarity matter most. Stories still earn their place, as proof and illustration, and the spine of the book is the argument.

The novel

A novel is free of the facts and bound instead to make every page feel true. The work moves from verifying to imagining, from sources to invention, and the discipline is consistency, of character, of world, of voice, more than accuracy. It is a different craft from the true genres, though it borrows their tools for scene and structure.

Why naming it first matters

Each of these genres wants a different structure, a different voice, and a different amount of checking. Decide which you are writing before you draft, and the rest of the work knows what to do. Start drafting without deciding, and you tend to write a memoir that wishes it were a novel, or a business book that loses its argument in anecdote.