Part 2 – Application
Genre storytelling carries a built-in contract: readers arrive with expectations. One of the key “rules” is to understand these expectations, to work with them, twist them, or break them with purpose. Neil Gaiman, in his Masterclass, highlights this dynamic. Genre is not a set of restrictions, but a shared language between writer and reader.
On a crowd-editing platform, I once described one of my stories containing a mysterious house. There were no ghosts, no shadows moving at the edge of vision, no whispers in the dark. A reader ranted at me, claiming I didn’t fulfill their expectations. To them, “haunted” implied a set of recognizable tropes, and the story had didn’t deliver. The critique wasn’t about content, but a broken promise.
Post-apocalyptic fiction holds on similar promises. Crumbling cities, fractured societies, roaming survivors, the lure of a cure, the desperate journey — these elements create the thematic and structural scaffolding of the genre. They ask enduring questions.
What happens when the systems that shape daily life disappear? When the conveniences, institutions, and routines that give structure are gone, what remains? In that silence, stripped of distractions, do people become more compassionate or more cruel? Do they band together for protection, or turn on one another for survival?
Tropes offer the framework for exploring these questions. The “safe house” offers a moment of vulnerability. The “traveling band” becomes a lens through which trust, loyalty, and human dynamics are tested. Even the possibility of a “cure” forces ethical dilemmas and exposes the depth of human hope or desperation.
In post-apocalyptic storytelling, the ruins are not the point. The people walking through them are. And within those ruins that the most revealing, unsettling, and meaningful human stories can be told.
