Loved and reviled and sometimes as brutal as the elements of nature itself, it does need to be said that these genres do make up the map of your favorite bookstore. However, unlike a bookstore, at DigitalPulp.org your story gets to sit on as many different shelves as you see fit. Which is why they are called Elements and not Genres. Where genres tend to pigeon hole the stories they encompass, elements simply describe a work's chemical make-up. Elements are smaller than the whole of the work, yet are vital in describing them.

It also needs to be said that these definitions should not be taken as the end word on what is what. Doubtlessly a wide and tumultuous debate hides behind each one. But just so we are all starting with an even keel....

Adventure

Adventure stories deal with risk and peril, life and death, and matters of dire importance which "hang in the balance." But mostly it has a lot of physical action and more than a few explosions. This element carries a very wide breadth, from Indiana Jones to the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Autobiographical & Biographical

Autobiographical stories are about ones own life. Biographical stories are about other people's lives. Unless the people involved are of such a star-like stature that nothing you could write can tarnish their reputation - be sure to change names to protect the innocent as well as the guilty (not that we won't know who you're talking about anyway).

College

College fiction has its pace set by the modern collegiate creative writing program. At its best, it reflects brilliance in style and technique. At its worst, it has non-descript people in a non-descript kitchen talking about things without ever referring to them.

Contemporary

Contemporary fiction deals with life in the post-modern era ('45-'01). It has a lot of surface and occassionally some substance. Generally there is no future and the past doesn't matter - or - at least there are a lot of people in it acting as if there is no future and the past doesn't matter.

Erotica

Erotica deals with sex and kinky doings. Note that DigitalPulp's rating system only goes so far as NC-17. There is no X or XXX. So stories dealing with erotica do need to have some kind of a story and not just a load of sex talk.

Espionage

Espionage is all about spies, double-agents and double-crosses. It can be as flashy as James Bond, as realistic as Tom Clancy or even as cheeky as Austin Powers.

Experimental

John Barth. Metafiction. A story about a writer writing a story about a story which eventually writes the writer - done completely sans pronouns. If it makes you giggle but makes the non-creative writing major sitting next to you reach for the air-sickness bag, it is probably experimental fiction.

Fan Fiction

Fan Fiction borrows pre-established characters from other people's work. It may not be legal, but it certainly is popular.

Fantasy

Fantasy deals with near mythical tales, typically set in the dream worlds of the past. The High Medieval Age. The Golden age of Greece. Ancient Egypt. Not what they actually were, but all that they could have been. This is everyone from Anne Mccaffrey to Sir Thomas Malory.

Gay/Lesbian

Gay/Lesbian fiction usually surrounds the matter of living with homosexuality in a predominantly heterosexual world.

Gothic

Gothic fiction is all about atmosphere. Typically gloomy and unhappy, but not always. Early gothic fiction was simply any work which spent more words giving character to its setting than character to its characters.

Historical

Where Fantasy deals with something resembling an idealized past, Historical fiction deals with an accurate past. Much research is given to making the story as historically accurate as possible.

Humor

Humor, comedy and satire. If it is meant to make people laugh (to be blunt) it is humourous.

Literary

Literary fiction appeals to and upholds trends set by the accepted literary greats of ones culture. Stuffiness should not be confused with cultural distance. Anyone who knows Melville, Dickenson, or Thoreau knows that there is nothing stuffy about Melville, Dickenson, or Thoreau.

Military

Military fiction deals with war, from the close up world of personal experience to the global overview of troop movement and strategic advances.

Mens

Mens fiction appeals to the manly man with stories ranging from bear hunting in the prisitine wilds of Manitoba to that weekend of hot rods, strippers, and the flying keg of beer which knocked over the barbeque and set the deck on fire.

Modern

Modern is not new yet perpetually new. It is best typified by the more outlandish fiction of the early 20th Century, 1890 - 1945. Joyce, Woolf, Ellison, and Faulkner. It is the world of writing first feeling the pinch of other forms of media and knowing it must do something stylistically different in order to survive.

Mystery

Mystery is a puzzle on page. It is a challenge to the reader to think ahead of our intrepid detectives and solve the crime just moments before they do.

Nonfiction

While DigitalPulp.org is meant to be used for fiction, there is nothing wrong with the occassional non-fiction piece; especially when written in a literary vein, or possibly as a theory piece about what makes good fiction.

Nostalgic

All fiction contains elements of nostalgia, but nostalgic fiction revels in the trappings of a certain time, period, style or movement.

Occult

Witches who boil and eat children are fantasy. Children who boil and eat witches are horror. Stories which depend upon and revel in the culture of Wicca and other forms of new age mysticism (please do not turn the webmaster into a Toad for putting the two together on the same page) is Occult.

Pastoral

Pastoral fiction takes place in the countryside. Typified by Laura Ingells Wilder, the pastoral is generally American yet not trapped in any one place or time; afterall, leave the city and you enter the country - no matter where you are.

Poetry

What has happened to poetry? The designers of DigitalPulp.org are busily at work putting together DigitalPulp.org which is basically the same service only tailored to poetry. Because of this DigitalPulp. org is no longer handling poetry.

Political

This is fiction with a political bend and possibly a hidden (or not so hidden) agenda or two.

Religious

Religious fiction often deals with life as seen through the lens of one religion or anothe.

Romance

Romance is fiction which deals with a love of love, falling in and out of it on every odd page. If your bodices are being ripped asunder - this is for you.

Satire

Satire can be funny and works best when it is, yet it generally has a sharper edge than humourous fiction, often seeking to change a readers view on an issue.

Science Fiction

Science Fiction is so broad a catergory it is impossible to define, yet most of us know it when we see it, typically on the big screen with films like Star Wars, Star Trek, the Matrix and Blade Runner (but not necessarily Close Encounters of the Kind or ET - See Speculative)

Serial Novel

Short stories begin with a beginning and end with an ending. Which may be why many writers would rather write a novel than a short story. Nothing is harder beginnings and endings. If your work doesn't have both, mark it as a Serial Novel. And don't keep us hanging on the installments !

Sketches

A considerable weight comes from making sure a story has a beginning and an end, as well as some place interesting to go in the middle. The sketch does not. It simply is. It describes a character, a time or a setting and that is it.

Speculative

Speculative Fiction is an older form of science fiction, coming from a time when we looked forward to the future with considerably more optimism than can be found in the current incarnation of Science Fiction. Basically it takes life and speculates about how it will change under scientific and technological development.

Urban

Urban fiction is the fiction of the cities. Think of the ultra-gritty detective novels of Chester Himes, with Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. Urban fiction does not just take place in a city, but it is about the city itself.

Western

Western stories exist, at least in spirit, in the old west. The trappings surround saddle-sores and six shooters, and showdowns when the sun is high. Alliteration aside, the Western is really a matter of exploration, freedom, and a taming of the wilderness - inside and out.

Womans

Womans fiction delights in being a girly girl. It is cosmopolitian and exquisite. It revels in matters of social circles, scandalous love, and the perils of wearing the wrong shade of crystal pink lipstick to the latest champagne function.

Young Adult

Young Adult is what you read when you are old enough for books without pictures and yet too young to drive. Think the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and the Oliver to their Brady Bunch - Encyclopedia Brown.