Introduction
Hello everyone! My name is Greg, and to be honest I'm not completely sure what to say in my introduction so here goes nothing. I never pay enough attention to myself for these things. When I was in 4th grade one of my teachers had a poster on the wall listing things to do when you were bored. One of them was writing a story about an adventure, so I gave it a shot. From that moment on I fell in love and its been a passion ever since. I haven't had much exposure to the creative writing major here yet, but I'm hoping that this will help me with inspiration for different writing styles and increase my over-all writing skill. Most of my writing consists of short stories but I want to learn to expand my ideas into novels because even though this is something that I love, I have confidence issues with my work.
Response
The human mind craves organization, and that is what I've always thought of when I hear the word genre. It's basically an organization system for fiction. The origin of the word even comes from a french word meaning kind or sort. If you will, think of fiction like food. There are many different types of food that can be categorized many different ways. Different genres are like the different groups of food on the food pyramid; it is a way to organize and categorize, in general, what the piece contains. In the reading, it almost sounded like literary writers were getting mad at genre writers because, in a way, they viewed it as if they were almost selling out. It seemed absurd to me that people actually looked down on genre writing. Just because genre writing is seen as more structured does not make it a lesser writing. Even if the writing is classified as literary writing, it still has the ability to contain elements that can categorize it into a genre; a story does not need structure to have a genre.To me, the people that think that are taking the praise to seriously. I feel like genre writers will use it as a framework for a type of story they would like to write, but that does not mean that they only write in that genre. I personally would classify myself as a horror writer, but I've written in many different genres and have also tried to break away from structure in my work. For example, it was said that in romances that the guy usually gets the girl or in an adventure the hero usually saves the day; it is more interesting to me if an event is unusual for the genre but still remains feasible. In other words, if the story calls for a happy ending, I still may not leave you with one. There are plenty of other experimental writings out there that combine elements of literary writing and genre writing. The great thing about fiction is the fact that there are no real rules.
