#1: The Breakup Story
In this story, the author uses fiction as a free psychotherapy session in which he or she humps his or her own relationship history to death against the cold leather seat of a Toyota truck parked outside of a permanently closed Denny’s on a rainy day in the author's distant past. Often made worse by the incorporation of erratic line breaks that appear to have been made at random by a lonely, drunken MS-DOS computer.
#2: The Post-Apocalyptic Cops-In-Space Cop Drama
This particular genre is the most overworked horse in the race against things that make any sense at all, and has broken its leg, and needs to be taken out and shot. Stock characters include an aging alcoholic veteran cop, a rookie cop who still has a thing or two to learn about a thing or two, and a wily She-Cop with outrageous curves and the emotional intelligence of a turkey sandwich.
The only way I can accept the existence of this genre in a college-level writing workshop is to believe that beneath every printing lab there is a dungeon full of 12-year old boys who think up this shit and dictate it to a few dozen chimpanzees in suspenders who chain-smoke Lucky Strikes and type it up on old-fashioned IBM Selectric typewriters, and somehow these fucked up chimpanzee stories keep getting mixed in with the real stories and taken to workshops by mistake. It's the only way. It's just...it's the only way.
#3: The Midlife Crisis Story, As Predicted By A 22-Year Old White American Male
The main character is a middle-aged, mild-mannered, slightly tubby American man with a once-hot-and-exciting wife who seems to have soured with age and some spoiled kids he doesn’t really know what to do with and a boring job, all of which makes getting a boner impossible. Then comes the classic epiphany and the zany scheme that will bring his boners back, be it an office robbery, a computer scam, or an affair with the neighborhood strumpet. It is always painfully clear in these stories that the author's worst nightmare involves being stuck in a four-bedroom house in suburban America, having somehow found himself trapped in a perpetual state of almost unthinkable comfort and luxury, trying in vain to gain an erection from watching the drive-through scene in 'American Beauty' in a continuous loop and wishing that he, too, could have the gay hugged out of him by Kevin Spacey.
#4: The Sixth Sense Story
This clever bait-and-switch technique didn't even exist until the classic M. Night Shyamalan movie 'The Sixth Sense' came out in 1999, and Haley Joel Osmond turned out to be merely the cooler, sexier side of Bruce Willis's split personality. Any story that ends with the revelation that one or more characters were actually dead or figments of another character's imagination the entire time is automatically awesome, no matter what, forever. It's a law of physics. Newton figured it out when he noticed an apple fall from a tree, and then an hour and forty minutes later it was a flank steak.
#5: The Truly Just Fucking Terrible Fantasy Masturbation Hour
The people who write these kinds of stories are not entirely to blame for their sins. After all, much of a writer’s skill is honed by what the writer reads, and these kids have never read a book with human main characters, and so have spent their long, lonely adolescences molding their imaginations into magical fuck dens and enchanted fuck forests in which they can shape-shift into a talking rat, lure Robert Jordan into a nearby field of daisies and then furiously finger-bang him with their magical little rat fingers. However, I have written several strongly worded letters to the President asserting my conviction that any citizen who engages in magical rodent erotica fan-fiction on a regular basis should not be legally allowed to come within 50 feet of a printing device, no matter how brilliant the chimpanzee typist behind it. Perhaps on their birthdays we can give them some crayons and a napkin to draw on or something, but that's it. We cannot afford to let another Robert Jordan, Talking-Rat, Magic-Meadow Spaghetti Festival go walking out into the world in broad daylight and fuck everything up for the rest of us. We just can't.
