on a mission

Sorry about last week, guys. I was working on a post but it was mostly a really random and heated rant about national stereotypes that I ultimately decided didn't need to be published.

Operating on some good advice given by a old friend, I'm looking to immerse myself in some dystopian literature in an effort to spark my imagination again with my own story. I've been reading quite a bit lately but none of it has been the right genre for relevant inspiration. Reading similar stories to what you're writing is really important and helpful for staying focused and keeping your imagination where you need it. The problem for me is that I generally have an aversion to dredging my way through dystopian novels in this day and age since there's a lot of wading that has to go on before you find something more interesting than an echo of the big titles that made the genre popular when I was in high school. I'm currently looking into The City of Ember and Floodland though I would welcome suggestions [as well as any personal opinions about those two titles].

I'm hoping I can find some good material to get my mind in the right place again but I'm also aware of the fact that my story doesn't neatly fit into the dystopian genre. When I think of true dystopian I think of societies that appear utopian to the central characters who then discover a dark underbelly that tears apart their concepts of reality and morals [see: The Giver]. Marked falls a bit more along the lines of the Hunger Games in the sense that the centrally horrific part of the society is acknowledged from the get-go and the main characters themselves never believe it's a utopia. Most of the literature being billed as dystopian seems to fall somewhere between Giver and Hunger Games without really landing on either side which has developed a series of tropes and patterns that I'm a bit tired of, frankly. One of the reasons The Giver will always be on my bookshelf is that it never dissolves into all-out war, as is so common in a lot of the series that are popular now. At it's root, the characters we love in this genre are loved because they fight for something but does fighting for something better always come through war? Of course the answer to that is "no" and it may well not bother anyone else but I feel like that's a dangerous precedent to set, even in fiction. This paragraph has kind of wandered but the point is that I hesitate to simply say "dystopian" whenever someone asks what kind of story I'm writing. Is readership willing to let the genre grow to a definition that has more variety?