Your Favourite Genre

[BellaLestrange87]

I'm sure that many of us have a genre that we gravitate to when we write; a genre that we feel extremely comfortable in. For some people, that might be fluff. For others, it might be making people cry angst Rose. 

 

What genre(s) do you prefer? Why do you prefer them?

[Bat Stitch Crazy]

When writing, I seem to write loss well so most of my stories involve that in some way usually by death or loss of a relationship. It's not necessarily my favorite genre to write but angst seems to be easy for me when compared to fluff or humor.

 

I use writing as a form of therapy so I think that's why angst comes easy for me because I put the characters through whatever I happen to be going through at that time (EX. Read I Miss Him on my AO3) I definitely write what I know and want to work on a fic based off of what I went through with my now ex-husband but it won't be allowed on HPFT and I wouldn't be able to link to it either because the subject matter would exceed what is acceptable here.

 

 

[FireOpal]

I find it very hard to choose genres for my stories (which is part of why I love AO3 so much - no genre tag! : P ), but I went over the ones I have genre defined (on HPFF or HPFT, so mainly HP stories), and it turns out I write mostly romance, but also a lot of angst (pretty mild angst, though...). I think romance is on top because my writing is pretty relationship focused and, angst is up there because it adds an element of drama that many stories need to be interesting.

 

If you had just asked me what I most enjoy writing, though, I think I would have said AU. There's something inmensely satisfying in taking something apart and putting it back together in a new way, and for me that includes stories. : )

[PinsandKneazles]

I think I'm going to invent a genre for myself called "soft drama" because I really like writing about the details of everyday ups and downs . I also quite like "soft dark" and "soft angst"

 

[Margaret]

One of my friends described my writing as being about "traumatised teenage girls." That's more my original fiction though. It might be more accurate to categorise my fanfiction as about "traumatised young women." I have a number of stories about teenage girls and young women - 15 to 26 year olds - suffering from PTSD.

 

I also write a fair amount of political stuff in fanfiction since there is more freedom to write about politics in an imaginary world.

[lovegood27]

Most of my stories (which aren't random one-shots) are romance. Sometimes it's fluff, sometimes it's drama or angst, but romance will always be the main focus. I find it fun to see how the relationship between the characters develop over time even though I always rush things way too quickly.

 

However, romances aren't always the easiest for me to write. I just like them. If I were to write what I thought was easiest, my stories would consist of a lot of AU. I haven't really written AUs but they seem easy because you don't have the boundaries of canon to restrict you. I feel like you could be more free but people would also find it interesting

[hedwig1751]

I find humour quite fun to write although it's been a bit hard to write about it lately because my ideas won't flow very well and I ADORE reading fluff. Even though I can't write it. 

 

I think drama is also fun to write (all of mine concern romance in some shape or form) , but I find it easier to write it once I have a plan on what's going to happen. With humour, I just go ahead without planning it.

 

Most of my stuff so far is canon (excepting the exact age of James Sirius, etc.) and I just feel like I enjoy reading that more than AU, with the exception of some really good fics that caught my attention 

[ImaRavenclaw]

I tend to gravitate towards the humour genre because I think I'm funny??? But seriously speaking I always seem to have better ideas and my characters get so in depth and personal that it's easier for people to connect to them.

 

I have experimented with some other stuff though (I like dark stuff even though I can't write it worth a damn). I once tried to write a sort of cruel kind of Drarry story after reading a sort of creepy and dark cruel Drarry story on HPFF, but I basically died trying so I was kind of like *shrug* 'can I even do this?' Maybe the reason I can't write dark stuff is because I'm an essentially optimistic person, and all the darkness just makes me curl up into a ball and cry, though I do love reading it. Bring on the (as long as they're not horror movie related) scares!

[Oregonian]

I would say that my stories are all, in their fundamental essence, character pieces, showing the development of my protagonist’s character, and the genre is the mechanism for making this come about.

 

I almost always write within the bounds of canon, and my stories usually end up in the “General” category, facing life’s struggles but not so gut-wrenching as to be called downright “Angsty”, rarely “Romantic” (and if so, only slightly), with a few humorous lines but not humorous overall, not dystopic to the point where Voldemort has won and almost all the good guys are dead.

 

Actually, “General” is a wide-open category with a vast scope of things to write about, and I welcome the possibility of writing topics that I don’t see in other stories, and of writing minor (sometimes very minor) characters, older characters, and obscure missing moments.

[Archer Rose]

Romance/Drama - I prefer next gen stuff. I guess I enjoy stories on the lighter side generally. I prefer next gen because there is most room to be creative plus more room to explore different ships. I don't really like canon ships of Ginny/Harry and Hermione/Ron so I don't enjoy reading them either so playing all with a set of new characters is a lot easier to write without feeling like you're going too AU or being disloyal to the source material. I wouldn't dare try to write Harry/Ginny/Ron/Hermione as main characters in my fan fic. I would only ever slot them into minor roles. I guess I answered more on the character side than genre.

 

I think it's quite hard to read/write a full novel without having angsty traits/moments within the story. I guess my OCs have conflict/angstry stuff within them to explain certain character traits or flaws but generally they are happy people, I write teenager characters with Hogwarts as a setting generally so a lot of it is about exploring the adult they are becoming. that's a common theme in my writing which generally falls into the 'drama' category.

 

[azimuth]

Friendship! Or would that be fluff? I find it easiest to write friendships with all the teasing and the laughter that comes with it. I just have so much fun with this genre. And even though I love reading romance, I don't really do it justice when writing it, I think.

 

I used to love writing angst when I was an angsty teenager about five years ago, but I find it much more difficult to write now

[Vilja]

So interesting to read about how other authors write!

 

I don't have that much writing experience myself, but what I do know is that I'm terribly bad with humour (that's why I recently maybed a challenge that requires humour, let's hope I can manage it ).

 

I'm the same as MalfoysAngel in that I also put the characters through whatever I happen to be going through at that time. But also in general I like dark atmosphere and suffering characters - there might be something wrong with me, but I love to emphatise with those. (Not too dark though, I don't really write anything above 12+).

And as a reader I also like to read about situations that are real, and that I can imagine myself going through.

 

The "hard to choose genres" problem seems to be common here, and I have that too, in fact the one time I've tried to write romance I've been told by a reviewer that this is not romance, maybe after-romance... I ended up calling it angsty romance.

 

I haven't tried AU (that lovegood27 suggests to be the easiest) but I tend to have OCs, that is kind of the same, I make up my own character so that I can do with him/her whatever I want. But I also think that AUs can be hard, it's not that you don't have the boundaries of canon to restrict you, but that you change one spefic thing compared to canon, but you have to keep the rest and it might be even harder to keep everything in the changed universe

 

I love to read mystery stories, and I've tried to write this genere too, but I think it's not an easy one, I remember looking up tiny pieces of canon information in a million places, and spending days and weeks trying to place together a plausible plot and to give enough information for the reader to understand, but not too much so that it remains mysterious.

 

[scooterbug8515]

Well I look at my author page on HPFT and I am not sure if I have a set genre.  (If we sprinkle in my old works not yet edited for HPFT) and the spectrum widens a bit.

 

I've done humor, I've done romance, dark and angst.  In some ways I think Angst to a certain level is my bread and butter. I may not totally rip the hearts of readers out but I do love working with character anguish and pain. Why I don't know, it's just a very real and interesting emotion to work with.  So I probably favor soft angst.

 

Outside of soft angst, I tend to love mystery. As Dossy above me has speculated mystery is hard and they are right.  Mystery is a huge challenge, setting up the red herrings without being obvious, dropping clues that can lead to the answer but at the same time not making the answer obvious. However, I love it and am proud to have it as my first foray into the published world. (Clearly I love it as I am working on a second mystery with a third planned in my head - though there will eventually be some angst (can't help myself!)

[Lost Muse]

I really like to write angst, I feel the most comfortable writing it, but not particularly heavy. I do like to write a lot of reflective internal monologue-type stories that hover on the angst/dark side so I don't know whether to call that angst or dark or general Internal monologue and soft angst I'd say is my speciality and comfort zone though.

 

Besides that, every once in a while, I do enjoy writing Fluff too - pure, happy romance. This is a recent development though, ever since I found love in RL, hehe.

 

As others have said before me, writing is a therapy of sorts for me - so I write when my mood strikes and usually when i'm emotional - either on the happy or sad end, and that's where my favourite genre lies at that time too!

 

I know am terrible at writing humor though - that's my least favourite genre to read or to write. Others, am more or less comfortable with any!

[batsam]

I don’t know if it would count as a genre or not, but I really enjoy (both reading and writing) experimental styles. I like testing new things and seeing what does and doesn’t work. One of my favorite things about using experimental styles is the ability to shape the form of the narrative to fit the mentality of the character, which I think adds a lot of depth.

 

I really enjoyed writing 19226, where the second half of the story is the first half backwards. That was a lot of fun to write, and I think it is also interesting to read. A couple others that were less experimental but I thought did a good job of matching the narrative style to the character were Confessions of a Marrying Murderess, which is kind of a stream of consciousness monologue type story, and My Ghost, which uses occasional parenthetical interruptions, for which their function is open to interpretation. Oh and Crowded, which is? What is that story even? That’s the kind of thing I like.

 

I also really enjoy microfiction, which I first tried in Maybe This Time for Renee’s challenge. I think that’s the only time I’ve written true microfiction, though I always enjoy reading it. This also connects to my love of short stories/chapters in general (both for reading and writing). Part of this is because I’m lazy and have low endurance, but more significantly I think it really enriches the intensity of a story to just focus on the most key elements and to make them as vibrant as possible, which is something I’ve enjoyed working with in When I Go Out With You.

 

I’ve never really thought of myself as particularly liking the romance genre, and I rarely read it, but my most recent stories have trended in that direction. What’s up with that? I think I kind of think of my romance stories as more “search for identity” stories, which both gets to the heart of why I don’t always like the romance genre and what I want to explore in myself and my characters - finding the ways to live and love that work best for who they are and their specific relationships.

[lebensmude]

My favourite genre is humour, it doesn't really matter what the other genres that the fic is listed under, if humour is one of those genres there is a very big chance that I will give your story a try. The reason why I prefer humour is because I like to laugh, I like to be entertained, I feel like there's already so much depressing stuff going on daily that the last thing I want when I have time to relax is to be even more sad. Not to say that I don't enjoy drama and angst and heartbreak and all that good stuff because I know that depending on the plot and the storyline that they can be necessary, but I like it when there's at least some funny instances.

And then there are some days where all I read is like angsty romance just because I'm going through an angsty romance phase and I'm like I NEED THIS IN MY LIFE RIGHT NOW and I'm usually only in this phase when I've re-read the Shatter Me series or another book that has romance that like makes my heart hurt with the romance.

[nott theodore]

I have definitely tried writing a lot of different genres, and I'm usually trying to push myself out of my comfort zone with writing, but I don't need to look at my AP to know that angst is the genre that pops up the most on it.  It's definitely the genre that comes most easily to me - I think I just really love exploring the depths of emotions experienced by characters in different situations.  That's definitely true for one-shots, at least.  It's not the main genre to my longer stories but it definitely plays a part.

[just.a.willow.tree]

Humor for me! If I'm writing something silly, or light-hearted, I always find myself enjoying the process much more, vs. when I try to crank out something that's properly serious and "good." It's really strange -- I've attempted some more serious works numerous times over the past year, and each time I became so unable to enjoy my writing that I'd just stop. But I've never had that problem really when I write things that are meant to be fun and enjoyable! Perhaps because I often associate serious works with having overall more "quality" writing, which really isn't true -- but it still leads to this pressure I put on myself when I write.

I've also always enjoyed reading humor fics a little more because I am not good with sad/angsty things -- including music, and movies, and everything  -- so perhaps that plays a part.