Everyone gets the same prompt to work on this week, but with a twist. Everyone will get a different genre to work in.

Prompt: There’s an old man sitting in a rickety wooden chair, fishing through a hole in the ice on a frozen lake. A loud cracking sound reverberates across the lake’s surface, and he feels the ice shift beneath him. He scurries, but the hole expands too quickly, and he goes into the icy water. What happens next?

Regular-Ass Genres for Noobs:

• Mystery – fiction dealing with the solution of a crime or the revealing of secrets
• Science fiction – story based on the impact of actual, imagined, or potential science, often set in the future or on other planets
• Fantasy – fiction in a unreal setting that often includes magic, magical creatures, or the supernatural
• Realistic fiction – story that is true to life
• Horror – fiction in which events evoke a feeling of dread and sometimes fear in both the characters and the reader

Extreme Genres for Cool People:

• Classic– fiction that has become part of an accepted literary canon, widely taught in schools
• Crime/detective– fiction about a crime, how the criminal gets caught, and the repercussions of the crime
• Fable– legendary, supernatural tale demonstrating a useful truth
• Fairy tale– story about fairies or other magical creatures
• Folktale– the songs, stories, myths, and proverbs of a people or “folk” as handed down by word of mouth
• Historical fiction– story with fictional characters and events in an historical setting
• Humor– usually a fiction full of fun, fancy, and excitement, meant to entertain and sometimes cause intended laughter; but can be contained in all genres
• Magical realism– story where magical or unreal elements play a natural part in an otherwise realistic environment
• Meta fiction(also known as romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature) – uses self-reference to draw attention to itself as a work of art while exposing the “truth” of a story
• Mythology– legend or traditional narrative, often based in part on historical events, that reveals human behavior and natural phenomena by its symbolism; often pertaining to the actions of the gods
• Mythopoeia– fiction in which characters from religious mythology, traditional myths, folklore and/or history are recast into a re-imagined realm created by the author
• Suspense/thriller– fiction about harm about to befall a person or group and the attempts made to evade the harm
• Swashbuckler– story based on a time of pirates and ships and other related ideas, usually full of action
• Tall tale– humorous story with blatant exaggerations, such as swaggering heroes who do the impossible with nonchalance
• Western– fiction set in the American Old West frontier and typically in the late eighteenth to late nineteenth century