Fantasy, sci-fi, adventure, horror, rock, hip-hop, jazz, country. These words all bring to mind music or books or television shows or movies. These are how you organize the different things you like. These are genres.

Genres can range even wider subjects such as non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. They're the different ways that you describe your car accident to your mom, your boss, or your best friend. Genre stretches beyond the creative fields of art, film, and writing; and even past the scholarly fields into every day life.

Genre is a way of organizing parts of our life. While we deal with different settings, we create rules for how we interact with the world. The kind of posture you use when you talk to your teacher and the pitch of your voice are involved in the everyday genres that we use.

So when you write an email to your teacher, you're following a certain kind of genre that you never thought of. These rules are sometimes called tropes. You point them out when you go to a movie, and it looks like a movie follows the formulaic plots that have come before it.

So when an artist plays around with different genres of art or of writing, they are taking the rules and elements that we expect and twisting them in on their own head. It's like when you receive an email from a teacher that feels informal. Or a really formal email from a friend. Playing with your expectations is a way of creating new genres and bringing something that has never existed to life.

So the next time you do art of any kind, think about how you could turn it into something new, or make it just unexpected enough to make it exciting for your audience. Think about the kinds of rules you follow when you write or talk to your boss or your parent, and try to see what happens when you mess with what they expect.