Genres

Let's start with the genres. If you want to write a story, you should first know what you want to write exactly. Of course, there are stories that make you suspect the author had absolutely no idea what they were doing, but I guess you can imagine only too well just how the quality of these stories tends to be.

Therefore, to give you a feeling for the different kinds of stories that can be written, I will now introduce the different genres of to you.

Adventure

In this genre, you can do literally anything that will hurt, scar, torture, traumatize, and/or cause severe mental issues for the characters. But don't kill them. If you kill them, you have to use the 'Tragedy' genre.

Just follow the steps of the typical 'Adventure' story:

1. The people you want to torture to near-death (mostly Merlin, sometimes Arthur, funnily enough never Uther) go out for a hunt, a stroll, a picnic or some other outrageously stupid task, it doesn't matter as long as they're outside and in the woods. Remember this: all bad things happen in the woods! It's an incontrovertible truth.

2. The heroes get attacked by bandits / brigands / mercenaries / soldiers / sorcerers / whatevers. It doesn't matter as long as they are brainless minions who are barely clever enough to breathe on their own and follow the orders of some evil mastermind (Morgana, Morgause, Mordred, some other Evil Dude whose name starts with "Mor-", someone bent on revenge for whatever reason you can come up with, etc).

3. The heroes get knocked out, are kidnapped and wake up again in some foreign place in some sh*thole of a cell.

4. After establishing the facts that A) nobody died, B) they can't get out and C) one character of your choice has a nasty injury of your choice that needs medical attention immediately, the heroes lean back and wait for some wonder to happen.

5. The Evil Dude appears and tells them about his ingenious, unthwartable, brilliant, overly complicated plan… which actually is pretty dumb and far too easy to foil.

6. Now you can let the Evil Dude torture the heroes for whatever reasons you like. Here are some examples from which you can pick: revenge, valuable information, more revenge, a crappy childhood, the most revengiest revenge ever, pure sadism, etc.

7. Once the heroes are half-dead and unconscious, the Evil Dude decides that he has enough and leaves them to rot.

8. Merlin (after waking up again) holds a highly dramatic and unnecessarily lengthy inner monologue about whether this would be a good situation to reveal his magic or not.

9. Don't let anyone bleed out during this highly dramatic and unnecessarily lengthy inner monologue.

10. Now you get to choose whether Merlin reveals his magic or not.

A) If he reveals it, let him use some really showy and awesome badass-spell to get them all out. Arthur will be horribly upset, but since Merlin just saved his life, all the years of deceit will be forgiven and forgotten. They make their way home. The End.

B) If he doesn't do it, he just waits for everyone else to faint due to blood loss to work his magic and get them all out. Afterwards, the others conveniently regain consciousness and they make their way home. The End.

11. If you totally forgot about the nasty injury of your choice that needs medical attention immediately from step 4, don't worry. Most of your readers will have, too.

Angst

In this genre, there normally isn't that much action, because torture is meant for 'Adventure' and 'Tragedy'. Except maybe if you make Arthur torture Merlin or vice versa. But only if there is much talking in between the bashing.

Because that is the main topic of 'Angst'. Talking. Yep, no kidding here.

The plotline is usually very easy to construct. Take a sad, depressing topic that fits into the concept of the show. Merlin contemplating the prospect of dying should he reveal his magic; some character mourning the death of another character; Arthur already knowing of Merlin's magic and contemplating the pros and cons of killing him; Morgana losing her favourite earring… Whatever you want.

Then, make them talk. Monologue, dialogue, trialogue, many people angrily shouting at each other – it doesn't matter as long as they talk to themselves or others.

Whatever problem the character has, just approaching someone and telling them is a no-go. First they have to drive themselves insane by thinking it over and over and over and over and over until they don't even know what topic they're getting upset about anymore. Then, just before they completely lose it and go jump off a tower, they decide for some reason to confine in someone else after all.

This conversation promptly goes to hell because now both characters drive themselves insane over the topic.

Essential for a good 'Angst' story is much shouting, much despair, much sighing, much hair-pulling, much accusing each other of horrible things that aren't even partly true and very much angst, fear, frustration, anger, black-and-white-thinking and more angst.

You can choose whether you want them to finally realise that the things they angst and fight about are trivial and stupid and they could use their time and breath for better things OR if they argue on until their friendship is shattered, their throats hoarse and their minds so full of angst that at least one of them takes off to finally go jump off that damned tower.

But don't write about the actual jumping part. That would be 'Tragedy'.

Crime

No-one ever uses 'Crime'. Not even I used 'Crime' for my stories, even though they're featuring a thieving Merlin and Arthur as a policeman, which is about as much 'Crime' as you can get around here. (Now that I think about it, I probably should have used 'Crime'…)

Use the genres 'Angst', 'Adventure' or 'Drama' instead. I'm sure your story will fit somewhere in those.

Drama

Basically, it's just a mix of 'Adventure' and 'Angst'. In 'Drama' you can write about something bad happening, which results in tension, angst and other inadvisable emotions that make the characters do stupid things instead of just talk about it.

Because holding a monologue about the problem is fine, but holding a dialogue is unthinkable. (Don't ask me why, just invent some shallow reason and stick with that.)

Here's an example: take the plotline from 'Adventure'. But instead of focusing on the fun part (i.e. the torturing), you only briefly mention what happened in a few sentences. (They went to the woods, were kidnapped and tortured, Merlin used badass magic to get them out. Yep, that's about it.)

The main part of the story is the aftermath. Arthur now knows about the magic and is terribly upset. Because instead of remembering that Merlin has been his servant for several years and couldn't possibly be that much of a failure as an assassin that he hasn't managed to kill anyone by now, he only concentrates on how Merlin lied to him for years and how he can't possibly choose between his best friend and his father's stupid laws. And don't forget the highly dramatic and unnecessarily lengthy monologue! But contrary to 'Adventure', in 'Drama', Arthur is the one holding it.

If the story is set during Series 5 of the show, try not to mention the fact that Arthur already realised what kind of prejudiced tosser his father was. (Dear Uther-Lovers, please remember the email address I gave you.)

Family

Can be paired with 'Romance' or 'Friendship', since you can choose two genres for your story. 'Family' basically is the second genre you choose solely because you don't know what other genre you could choose, but don't want to only have one. So, if you want to choose 'Romance'/'Family', look at the description of 'Romance'. If you choose 'Friendship'/'Family', look at the description of 'Friendship'.

Fantasy

Choosing 'Fantasy' as a genre is equally ingenious and stupid, because – come on! Labelling a story 'Fantasy' in a fandom of a show in which a wizard and a king go on dragon / griffin / goblin / pixie hunts and magic is used to make pretty glowing butterflies is kind of cheating, isn't it? (It is.)

So if you write a story in which some sort of magical beast appears and you have no idea whatsoever how to categorise it, stick with 'Fantasy'. That's the easiest way out.

Friendship

Writing a 'Friendship' story is very easy. All you have to do is focus your plot on the friendship between two or more characters.

They help each other in times of distress ('Friendship'/'Adventure'), they comfort each other after something bad or depressing happened ('Friendship'/'Hurt/Comfort'), or they overcome and forgive each other even the worst things after lamenting over them in highly dramatic and unnecessarily lengthy monologues OR dialogues (Yes, there actually are dialogues in 'Friendship'!) which just for once end in the realisation that throwing around pointless accusations won't help anyone ('Friendship'/'Angst' or 'Friendship'/'Drama').

You can also mix 'Friendship' with 'Romance', though that doesn't really make sense, since you usually don't want to be called a 'good friend' if you actually want into the other person's pants.

But I digress.

The only important thing is that you describe how much the characters like each other (as 'good friends', not in a romantic way), are there for each other and generally how much their friendship means to them.

Oh, how I LOVE the new Doc Manager. It's so ... competent. Not.
So sorry for the uploading fail, it really wasn't my fault. I blame my computer. And FanFiction. And the Internet. And the universe in general, too.