I’ve spent the last thirty years writing stories. I’d been doing this for a living for fifteen years before it occurred to me to wonder what a story was, and to attempt to define it in a way that was useful to me. It took me about a year of pondering, and eventually I decided that a story was anything that I made up that kept the reader turning the pages or watching, and did not leave the reader or the viewer feeling cheated at the end.

As definitions go, it worked for me. And sometimes it helped me figure out why a story wasn’t working, and what I could do to get it back onto the rails.

The other big thing that niggled at me was genre. I’m a genre writer, in the same way that this is a genre conference, and that only gets sticky or problematic in either case when one asks what the genre is, which leads us to a whole boatload of other questions.

My biggest question, first as a reader and then as a writer, was simply, what is genre fiction? What makes something genre fiction?

What is genre? Well, you could start out with a practical definition: it’s something that tells you where to look in a bookstore or (if you can find one these days) a video store. It tells you where to go. It tells you where to look. That’s nice and easy. Just recently Teresa Nielsen Hayden told me it wasn’t actually telling you what to look at, where to go. It was telling you what aisles not to bother going down. Which I thought was astonishingly perceptive.

There are too many books out there. So you want to make it easier on the people shelving them and on the people looking for them by limiting the places they’re going to go looking for books. You give them places not to look. That’s the simplicity of book shelving in bookstores. It tells you what not to read.

The trouble is that Sturgeon’s Law—which approximates to “90 percent of everything is crap”—applies to the fields I know something about (SF and fantasy and horror and children’s books and mainstream fiction and nonfiction and biography) and I’m sure it applies equally as much to the places in the bookshops I don’t go—from cookbooks to supernatural romances. And the corollary to Sturgeon’s law is that 10 percent of everything is going to be anywhere from good to excellent by any stretch of the imagination. It’s true for all genre fiction.

And because genre fiction is relentlessly Darwinian—books come, books go, many have been unjustly forgotten, very few unjustly remembered—the turnover tends to remove the 90 percent of dross from the shelves, replacing it with another 90 percent of dross. But it also leaves you—as with children’s literature—a core canon that tends to be remarkably solid.

Life does not obey genre rules. It lurches easily or uneasily from soap opera to farce, office romance to medical drama to police procedural or pornography, sometimes within minutes. On my way to a friend’s funeral I saw an airline passenger stand up, bang his head on an overhead compartment, opening it and sending the contents over a hapless flight attendant in the most perfectly performed and timed piece of slapstick I’ve ever seen. It mixed genres appallingly.