A Guide to the Fiction Genres

Ask anybody who is anybody in the world of writing what the fiction genres are and you probably won't get the same answer twice.

And these are people whose job it is to know.

Sure, they will agree on the main genres of fiction - romantic fiction, horror fiction, and so on.
But they won't agree on the dozens of sub-genres within each of the principal genres.

Why? Partly because there are so many of these lesser genres of fiction. And partly because the categories and sub-categories of fiction are forever changing as more new books hit the market and readers' tastes change.

In this introductory article, and in the articles which follow looking at specific categories, I can only talk about the most important fiction genres (and sub-genres, too).

Use the information to get a taste of what is available out there, then go to the bookstore (ideally a big one) to get your own feel for the range of books on the market and where you see your novel sitting on the shelves.

A Quick Caveat: Please note that I am by no means an expert on all of the fiction categories (nobody possibly could be). The aim of Novel Writing Help is to teach you how to write novels in general, meaning that the information on this website applies to all novels, of whatever category.

Romantic fiction, for example, might place more emphasis on plot and less on deep characterization than literary fiction, but that doesn't mean that the rules on Creating Characters don't apply to romantic novels, nor that the rules on How to Plot a Novel don't apply to literary fiction.

How do you discover the specific rules and conventions of your chosen genre of fiction? By reading as many novels from that genre as you can. (For more on this, read Book Genres and Conventions.)

But there are a couple of other ways in which you can find out this information:

By contacting the publishers of the novels you've been reading for research to ask if they have any "writers' guidelines" or "tip-sheets" for your particular category of fiction. The stricter the conventions of the genre, the more likely it is that publishers will have them (romance publishers certainly do).
By reading "how to" books dedicated to your chosen category and written by experts in the field. These specialist books will contain a lot of general novel writing advice (the kind you get from me) but there will be enough genre-specific information in them to make tracking down a copy worthwhile.