Introduction: “What type of story is this?”

This is an additional reference to help guide you when creating genre tags for stories.

We want our GENREs to help a user learn about the story "type" in one glance. This could be anything from

sci fi
fairy tales
queer fiction
fictional autobiography
dark satire
action and adventure
political thriller.

We want our Genres to be somewhat specific: Urban Fantasy (sort of under Fantasy) and Murder Mystery (under Mystery) “Science Fiction” is useful. “Hard Science Fiction” is even more useful. Combinations of genres, like “Fantasy” and “Historical Fiction” are useful.

Feel free to be more creative with the genres you use to label your stories! Don’t worry if you’re using a new genre label or if you’re being too specific. Our system can map genres to parent genres so “Queer Sci Fi” gets mapped to “Queer Fiction” and “Science Fiction.”

If you’re looking for genre Inspo, browse through our list of existing genres already generated by our readers.

Some Tips

Things to remember about genre classifications:

‘Magical realism’ should be used with caution; it was being misused a lot. It specifically applies to stories written in South America by a handful of authors at a particular time in history. For stories that feel like ‘Magical realism’, you might simply want to use two tags together: ‘Literary’ and ‘Fantasy’.
Contemporary and Drama are often combined as a genre because ‘Contemporary’ is the literary term for this genre, and ‘drama’ is the film and TV term; we anticipate people searching either of those words looking for the same thing.