The Genre Contract
🎯 Today's mission briefing
We are learning to identify the conventions that define a genre, explain the contract they make with the reader, and transform one event across genres on purpose.
You'll know you've got it when:
- I can name a text's genre and the specific conventions that signal it
- I can explain how genre selects and shapes details — the same events, differently told, become a different story
- I can rewrite a passage into a new genre by deploying that genre's conventions deliberately, and subvert a convention for effect
Same storm, four stories
Connects to what your guest already knows and makes them curious. Activating prior knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of new learning.
A summer storm knocks the power out in a coastal town for one night. That's it — that's the whole event. Now watch it multiply. The local paper: 'Residents of Currimundi spent Tuesday night without power after lightning struck a substation at 9:47pm.' A horror writer: 'The lights did not flicker. They simply died, all at once, up and down the street — and in the sudden dark, the house began to breathe.' A comedy: 'Dad, a man who owns four torches, could locate none of them. The dog, sensing weakness, ate the candles.' A survival memoir: 'It was the night the storm took the power that I learned what my grandmother's generation had always known.' Same lightning. Same substation. Four completely different stories — because before a writer types a single word, they've made a bigger choice than any sentence: they've chosen a genre. Today you learn to see that choice being made, and to make it yourself.