Literature is commonly grouped into four major kinds, or genres: poetry, drama, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Poetry emphasizes sound, rhythm, imagery, and concentrated feeling, and is often arranged in lines and stanzas. Drama is written to be performed, with dialogue, acts or scenes, and often stage directions.
Fiction is imaginative prose—short stories, novellas, and novels—built around invented characters and plots, even when inspired by real life. Creative nonfiction is also prose and story-driven, but it presents true people, events, or experiences, as in memoir and literary journalism. Genre borders can overlap, but these four categories remain a standard classroom map of literary forms.