How My Story Found Its Own Genre

(And Yours Will Too)

Somewhere between chapter one and the query letter, you are going to have to explain what your book is. And if your book refuses to stay in one lane, that's going to feel like a problem.

Mine certainly did.

Kingdom: Song of Silence is a fantasy novel. The magic system is built around music and sound frequencies. The world is underwater, enclosed in a glass dome, governed by a corrupt body that controls access to the magic in order to maintain power. There are rebels. There are trials. There are two boys who have been circling each other for years, held apart by everything the society has built to keep people like them in their place.

Fantasy, yes. But also: there's a techno-magic system with rules that function more like physics than folklore. There's a dystopian government controlling a resource. There's a countercultural underbelly pushing back.

I spent a while wondering if that made it less of a fantasy. If an agent would look at it and not know where to put it. If I was supposed to pick a lane and sand down the parts that didn't fit.

Then I described it to my fantasy writing group, and someone said: that's Oceanpunk.

I had never heard the term. So I looked it up, and then I sat with it for a while, and then I felt something click.

"Punk" as a genre suffix means something specific. It's not just an aesthetic. Steampunk, cyberpunk, solarpunk, and all their relatives share a set of structural traits: a core technology that defines the world, a stylized or gritty environment shaped by that technology, and a countercultural or anti-establishment tension running through the story. The magic, the dome, the Syndicate's stranglehold on the Resonance, the rebels in the Reach. That's not fantasy adjacent to punk. That is punk, filtered through an ocean.

"Oceanpunk fantasy" is two words that tell an agent exactly what they're getting before they open the query. That's not a limitation. That's a gift.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about genre: you don't have to decide it before you write the book. You probably shouldn't. Genre labels applied before the story exists tend to become cages. You start writing toward the label instead of toward the truth of the story, and the truth is what makes it worth reading.

What you should do is write the story as honestly as you can, and then look at what you actually have. The genre is already in there. You just haven't found the word for it yet.

And sometimes the word finds you in a conversation you weren't expecting, from someone who read your description and saw something you were too close to see yourself.

A few practical notes for when you're ready to label yours:

Start with the main genre, then get specific. "Fantasy" is your parent category. The subgenre is what distinguishes you within it. "Oceanpunk fantasy" tells a reader the world type, the tone, and the structural logic all at once.

Look at the punk suffixes. If your world is defined by a specific technology or resource that shapes society, and there's an anti-establishment conflict at its heart, some variation of punk might be the right frame. It's not just for steam and circuits.

If the subgenre doesn't exist, you might get to name it. The writing community generates new terminology all the time as new kinds of stories emerge. If your story genuinely doesn't fit an existing label, that's worth noting in your query, not hiding.

Comp titles help more than genre labels anyway. Once you know your genre, find two or three recently published books that share its DNA. Those titles do more work in a query than the label itself.

Your story knows what it is. Keep writing and it'll tell you.

tl;dr: Don't force your story into a genre box before the draft is done. Write honestly, then look at what you have. The genre is already there. Sometimes it takes an outside eye to name it, and sometimes that name opens everything up.

By the way... today is my birthday. Here's to taking another turn around the sun!