GenresFiction
Adventure
Movement, landscape, and the test of nerve.
Adventure is a book that moves. Someone leaves a place they understand and is tested by distance, weather, enemies, or simply the size of the job they have taken on. The reader wants momentum, but they also want to know why this person can't turn around and go home. A quest with no cost is a holiday. A journey that keeps taking things away, time, safety, certainty, companions, is a story.
Landscape does a lot of the work if you let it be specific. A sea, a mountain, a city nobody in the party can read, a jungle that is not just green. You don't need a new peril in every chapter, and in fact a book that never pauses starts to feel like a list of dangers. Give the characters time to want the next mile, and write the practical problems, food, maps, injuries, arguments, because those are what make the big moments feel earned.
The kinds of book inside it
Survival
The environment is the opponent, and the details of staying alive are the plot, so they need to be accurate enough to feel dangerous.
Quest
There is a goal at the end of the road, and the road should change the person before they arrive, or the arrival won't matter.
Seafaring
Ships give you a closed world, a hierarchy, and weather that does not care about anyone's plans.
Exploration
The unknown is the attraction, and the book is often about what the explorers think they are doing as much as about what they find.
Lost world
A hidden place has its own rules, and the visitors should not be able to treat it as a theme park they can leave unchanged.
When you want a first sketch, Storywell can draft a story summary in this vein. You are still the one who writes the book. Compose an idea.