The Writers Guide To Writing

Genre

A genre tells readers what the major theme through your book is. Is it an adventure novel? A mystery? Rom-com? The genre gives the gist of what this stories about before you've even read a word. Here's a break down of a few genres vefore we get into the big bits:

Fantasy: the fantasy genre explores all things magic and mischief. Its mostly known to contain potent spells from evil witches and vengeful dragons and fae folk.

Science-Fiction: while similar to fantasy, science fiction tries to give a scientific back bone to the strange aliens created in its world. You'll find lots of futuristic-dystopian type stories here.

Romance: teen angst and heartfelt drama fills the romance section. While romance can still be a theme in any other genre, its the absoloute main focus in this one, and everything else is a subplot.

Horror: the horror section is where the writers with the minds of psychopaths live. A horror story can feature paranormal, but more often than not, humans are crazy enough to give you the chills.

Mystery: similar to horror, there are usually a lot of psycho and sociopaths available in mystery, but theres also a trusty detective doing their best to track them down.

Werewolf: now, werewolf stories can fall into the fantasy or paranormal section, but here on wattpad, there are many, many fans of these moon loving creatures. These stories feature human/wolf hybrids, usually with heavy undertones of romance.

Now, for most people, deciding the genre of their story is a pretty cut and dry situation. But, for some of us, this can get harder when you have lots of big themes running in parallel. Also, on wattpad, when you look at whats trending in your ideal genre of choice, it can put you off of leaving your story in that genre.

For example, when I started writing DOTD I put it in the fantasy section because dragons, right? But the trending stories in fantasy were nothing like mine. So I headed over to the adventure section and there were a couple more matches over there. But, an adveture tag just didn't do my story justice. And that was the key.

On Wattpad, you have the fabulous oppurtunity to add tags to your story. You can also see the trending tags for each genre. In the fantasy section there are tags like: highfantasy, epicfantasy, dystopia, magicalcreatures which are all great sounding tags that very accurately describe my story. In the adventure section, the tags are a bit more generic.

In the end I left my book in fantasy. My book definitely had a lot of fantastical elements and the tags in the adventure section just didn't do justice to some of my more major themes.

So, if you are undecided between two big genres, check the trending tags in each one (I think this can only be done on the web version of Wattpad) and see which place has more matches for your story. That will help to let you know what kind of themes readers want from stories in those sections.

I hope this helps anyone eho wasnt sure what a genre is or how to classify their story. If you're still struggling to decide, give me an overview of your story and I'll see if I can help!!

Orange,

XxXx