Writing in a 'mode,' not in a 'genre'

Marketers are fussy about genre boundaries, understandably. They have to know the audience to whom they're pitching the product, and they have to define the product for that audience. The boundaries are "imaginary," and artists don't have to enforce them. If the artist is also a marketer, that's another matter. But very often artists act like marketers without being aware of the conflict of values that can arise: Should they enforce these boundaries? Why? What if we think of certain features not as "genres" but as "modes" — there's a feeling, a tone, an approach, but not a firm category?

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Drew Daniel, Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature, The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London, 2022:

"To risk some overbroad assertions of my own, genre is a technology that manages difference and repetition as it depicts and reinforces or playfully subverts ongoing processes of social stratification. Genre’s technology mediates the dialectical conflict between group and individual within all literary representation as such. A less inflamed way to say this is that we scan individual characters and their actions against an inescapably prior, tacit background of expectations regarding socially legible types and narrative outcomes. Genre is one name for that background.
Genre Trouble
Omnipresent yet slippery, genre is what nobody really believes in but everyone relies upon. Whether one is writing literary criticism or simply grazing the pull-down menu on Netflix, we expect genre’s thin but sturdy tether to bind together an implausibly wide array of qualities within a work: the kinds of action within a plot, the way a story will end, the kinds of characters who will appear as primary, the kind of language that they will use, and the emotional tone a work solicits. Taking its origin from the very concept of originality, “genre,” in its derivation from the Latin word “genus,” provocatively conflates birth, origin, race, sort, and kind. That last word is primary in early modernity, for its protobiological connotations relay Aristotelian naturalist habits of mind, homely metaphors of animal husbandry, and shifting logics of racialization."

Or it's 'aesthetic signifier' for the purpose of selling books

It's... really silly to see any such discourse at all. I thought we all agreed genre was a flexible marketing construct, more aesthetic signifier than a set of hard rules? We need to be more relaxed about this sort of thing, it's such small potatoes.

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— Philby Bear (@philbybear.bsky.social) November 25, 2025 at 9:19 AM

Or more like an 'ecosystem'

"Calling it a genre feels like mistaking weather for climate. What I make here isn’t a category—it’s an ecosystem. A shifting sky. A map of pressures and fronts and quiet storms that know their own direction. The AutSide is what happens when I stop trying to write the world in straight lines and instead let the world speak in the shape it arrived: layered, restless, alive." (The Shape of What I Write (And Why It Refuses to Behave): On Writing Across Genres, Against Erasure, and Toward a Life Big Enough to Hold Its Own Truths. Jaime Hoerricks, PhD, Dec 01, 2025)