Little Used Genres You Should Write In

HopePunk

All you need is a dire situation that encompasses everything and a main character that will not give up. Hope is not gentle and soft, it is not a gelatinous mold wiggling on the table and waiting to either melt or be smashed. Hope is strong. Hope is terrifying. Hope is nothing more than a happier name for spite, and it is feeding your main character. The world is dark and hard and scary but your main character will not stop trying to make everything better. Your main character turns hope into a weapon and tries to bludgeon the darkness right out of the world.

SleepyCore

All of your characters are sleepy. Your setting is sleepy. You are sleepy. All you want to be doing right now is lying in bed. Perhaps you would be sleeping. Maybe you would be reading a book or staring at your phone or doing nothing at all, but you would be cuddled up in your favorite blankets and that’s all that matters. But, no, you are sitting upright. At your desk. Fingers languidly gripping a pen or lightly tapping a keyboard without actually pressing the buttons. Perhaps there is coffee, but it is not helping. You are not tired. You are sleepy. And everyone can tell.

MallSoft

How long has this mall existed? How long has it been abandoned? How long has your character been in this mall? You have none of these answers and neither does your character but the music is still playing and the lights are still on and the stores are still full of merchandise marked down fifty percent for some sort of mall-wide clearance sale but there are no people. No people besides your character who is walking around and trying to buy things but no one will take their money and it is dark out, so dark out, it presses against the glass domed ceiling above the top floor and your character doesn’t even remember why they need to buy the things they want or who they are for.

NormieCore

Things happen, and that’s okay. Everyone is just going to be normal about it. The man down the street woke up this morning. He had a normal breakfast and maybe some coffee if that’s normal where he lives, maybe tea, maybe nothing, and then he finished getting dressed and went to work. Work was normal. His boss was normal. Everything is so aggressively normal it continually borders on interesting without ever fully making the jump past that line. Sun rises. Sun sets. Time moves forward. Things are said and heard and responded to and then other things happen and it’s all so very, very normal.

Sluts Ahoy

Everyone in your story is a slutty mess but this isn’t smut or erotica or porn. It’s a story, any story, fully populated by people doing the sluttiest things imaginable at all times. Sword fighting. Wearing long, open coats. Winking at each other, just, like, all the time. The looks your characters are serving are fucking incredible. You’re spending three paragraphs describing how each character looks and your reader is devouring it with a spoon. Sometimes the sluttiest choice is the best choice but a lot of the time they are completely separate paths for your character. But you know which choice your character is going to make no matter how much it sets your plot on fire.

Pure Moods

What, exactly, is happening in your story? Where is the plot? Why would you know? That isn’t what this story is about. You don’t even know what this story is ‘about,’ if that’s even a real word. All you care about is how the story makes your readers feel. By the end of the story the reader may not know what happened or who it happened to but they intimately feel that you were listening to “Run” by Snow Patrol on repeat while you were writing. And they are right.

PiratePunk

The best part about pirate punk is that you don’t have to have the ocean in your story. You don’t even have to have ships, or parrots, or literal pirates. PiratePunk isn’t about actual pirates, it’s about any sort of drifter who manages to stay one foot ahead of certain death, and is only really doing it for the love of the game. Cowboys are pirates Drifters are pirates. Con artists are pirates. Your main character could die at any moment from exposure but that’s not what they’re worried about. In fact, they’re not worried at all.

The Power of Enemies

Similar to, but the spiritual opposite of, the power of friendship. Your main characters are not friends. In fact, they hate each other. And they never stop hating each other. But they both have exactly the same amount of spite for a third party, and that shared spite is the only thing keeping them going and not turning on each other. Your story is nothing but fights, both between the protagonists and the antagonist, and also between your protagonists. Your readers biggest question should be ‘will they kill each other before they manage to kill the enemy?’

Feral Women

I’m sick of stories about women who are ‘kind’ and ‘selfless’ and ‘have their shit together,’ and if they have a flaw, it’s, oops! They’re a little bit clumsy! Tee hee! More stories need to be written about absolutely unhinged women who are barely keeping it together and making it everyone else’s problems. I want a woman who eats a beef and bean burrito the size of a newborn with plenty of cheese and sour cream even though she’s lactose intolerant. I want a woman who manages to torpedo the mood of every event she is invited to. The only reason she keeps getting invited to anything is because if you’re not on the receiving end of her insanity, it’s honestly pretty funny. I want a woman to get slighted by a man on Sunday and then make the rest of her week about destroying this man’s life until by Saturday he’s dead and she’s in jail. And, like, all he did was cut her off in traffic.

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