GenresFiction
Contemporary Fiction
Stories set in the recognisable now.
Contemporary fiction is set in a world the reader can recognise without a glossary, which sounds simple until you try to make ordinary life feel worth a whole book. Jobs, phones, rent, friendships that have gone slightly stale, and the particular weather of the present all belong here. The trick is to be specific about now without dating the book so hard that it reads like a news report in two years.
Readers of this shelf are often looking for company more than spectacle. They want to recognise a situation and then be surprised by the person inside it. You can be funny, sad, or both, and you don't need a high concept, though one can help a book stand out in a crowded shop. Write the present as if you live in it, because you do, and leave out the details that are only there to prove you have noticed the internet.
The kinds of book inside it
Slice of life
The book follows a stretch of ordinary time, and the pleasure is in how closely it watches, not in a twist waiting at the end.
Relationship
Friendship, marriage, or a love that isn't quite either of those is the engine, and the plot is what those people do to each other.
Workplace
An office, a kitchen, a hospital, or a shop gives you a ready-made set of rules, and the story is what happens when someone bends them.
Small town
Everyone has a version of everyone else, which is useful, because a secret has somewhere to travel and a newcomer has a crowd to misread them.
Upmarket
Commercial enough to be readable on a train, and written with enough care that a book club will want to argue about it afterwards.
Ensemble
Several points of view share the book, so you need a reason they belong in the same story and a way to tell their voices apart.
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.