Genre is a category of literary composition, such as mystery, science fiction, romance, or horror, and each genre carries genre conventions—reader expectations that shape what readers hope to find. Writers can play with or deliberately break conventions to subvert expectations for effect. Genre fiction is generally plot-driven and conventions-bound, while literary fiction emphasizes style and depth. Within prose fiction, length categories give writers rough guides: microfiction runs under one hundred words or so, flash fiction often under a thousand words, short stories usually span one thousand to seven thousand five hundred words, novellas run roughly seventeen thousand five hundred to forty thousand words, and novels typically fall between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand words.
Beyond fiction, creative nonfiction applies literary techniques to factual writing. A memoir is a narrative nonfiction work drawn from personal experience, and an essay is an organized argument or reflection, often structured with an introduction, body, and conclusion. A narrative essay is told as a story. Poetry uses rhythm, sound, and imagery, often in condensed forms: meter is the rhythmic structure of verse, with iambic pentameter—five iambs per line—common in Shakespeare. A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem with specific rhyme schemes, such as the Shakespearean or Petrarchan; free verse sets aside regular meter and rhyme; and a haiku is a Japanese form of three lines in a 5-7-5 syllabic pattern, often about nature. Other poetic terms include enjambment, where a line continues without pause into the next; stanzas, which group lines like paragraphs; refrains, repeated lines or phrases; rhyme schemes, the pattern of end rhymes; internal rhyme, rhyme within a line; slant rhyme, near rhyme using similar but not identical sounds; and alliterative verse, in which alliteration serves as a primary structural device.
Speculative fiction is a broad category encompassing science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Hard science fiction emphasizes scientific accuracy, while soft science fiction focuses on social and human aspects. High fantasy takes place in fully invented worlds, low fantasy in the real world with magical intrusions, and grimdark is a subgenre with a dystopian, amoral tone. Magical realism blends realistic narrative with magical elements treated as normal. In crime fiction, noir offers dark, morally ambiguous stories while cozy mystery features amateur sleuths and minimal violence. Shorter forms include the vignette—a brief, evocative scene or descriptive sketch—and the frame story, a story within a story. Allegory, fables (often with animals, illustrating morals), parables (illustrating spiritual lessons), myths (traditional stories explaining beliefs or natural phenomena), and folklore (the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a culture) all belong to this family of forms.
Craft principles bind these forms together. Verisimilitude is the appearance of being real or true, and suspension of disbelief is the reader's willingness to accept fantastical elements for the sake of the story. Chekhov's gun advises that every element introduced should serve the story, while a deus ex machina—a contrived resolution by an unexpected savior or device—violates that principle. A McGuffin is an object or goal that drives the plot but is unimportant in itself. Stories may be character-driven, where internal change matters more than external events, or plot-driven, where events and twists predominate. Common narrative patterns include the hero's journey, with its call to adventure, refusal, supernatural aid, threshold, trials, transformation, and return, and the save-the-cat moment, a scene establishing the protagonist as sympathetic.