Category Archives: Guest Posts

Guest post by Jayne Barnard.

It isn’t easy to pull a balance of elements from two genres into a single story. Mysteries need crimes, suspects, red herrings, and character development for motivation. Science fiction and fantasy require questing characters, a reasonably adventurous plot, and a certain amount of world-building as well. Each of those elements absorbs words, and melding them all smoothly into a single narrative – often a short story with a tight word count – can be agonizing. Here are three keys to cutting down the word-wastage and blending the genre elements smoothly:

Don’t describe anything about the story-world except the facets needed to understand the action. Concentrate on what’s different from the reader’s default Earth-based mental image. Integrate those world-building elements into the characters’ inner thoughts, actions, and dialogue. Even though you, the author, must know what political, social, technological and possibly tectonic elements shaped the physical surroundings, your readers don’t need to know it all. Your readers only need to feel confident that it does fit together in some rational pattern, and that if they asked you, you could tell them. So only describe the bits that they need to know to understand the current story.

In When the Tide Burns (appearing in BURNT, Analemma Press, August 2016), the setting is a barge moored in a garbage-packed cove as the wind is rising. This could be present time, familiar reality for coastal dwellers until the fifth sentence. The soapberry wax, all that protected their clothing and equipment from the acid spray, was down to its last sheen in the tin’s bottom corners. Not such a normal cove after all, but one holding a danger unfamiliar to the readers. The implied menace of the acid spray, combined with the rising wind, are not only effectively alien elements of world-building but introduce a sense of a rising menace against which our protagonist must pit her wits.

When introducing characters, only describe what makes the alien, orc, or robot different from an ordinary human. Don’t bother with anything about their culture or planet of origin unless it’s vital to the plot of this story. You need to know it all; the reader doesn’t. Again, integrate. Don’t info-dump.

In Quest for Parts (Enigma Front, Analemma Press, 2015) we see what the protagonist sees: a scrawny, pasty, generally human-looking intruder. But… Ignoring the racket, the guy stared into the sky-blue mirror, adjusting a knob at his collar with one claw. His face shimmered, gaining warmer tones while losing the sharp tips to his nose, ears and chin. The lasers in the room shimmered, too, stopping when his face settled. This character has claws, not fingernails, and can adjust his appearance by turning a knob. He’ll need those assets later in the story, so best to slide them into our protagonist’s, and the reader’s, first impression.

Make some element of your mystery one that could only occur in that particular alternate reality. Stories that could have happened down the block but are set on a space station will not be as engaging as those that require, nay, demand the setting and culture you have created for them.

In MADDIE HATTER AND THE DEADLY DIAMOND, the inciting incident sets this up immediately: The expeditionary airship of Baron Bodmin, ardent African explorer, has been found adrift and deserted. Its log-book is missing and no clue remains to its captain’s fate. A fortnight after its last sighting over the mouth of the Suez Canal, the airship appeared off the coast of Cornwall, floating low and rudderless above the waves. No escape canopy or life-vest remained on board. The batty baron must have vanished from an airship because only airships can stay aloft indefinitely without fuel or a pilot. Exactly where he vanished, and whether by accident, on purpose, or someone else’s design, is the first of many questions for which our intrepid Steampunk reporter must seek answers.

Now to integrate them all. An example from Painted Jade (unpublished) opens with all of the above: Working security on the top side of a conglomerate-built drift makes you a traffic warden in any gated community anywhere. You spend your days petting the dogs and smiling at the nice ladies. Or, if you’re me, trying to reverse that process. Troubles happen way down the bottom, where the ore processors and overcrowded labor force are located. Not my turf. I’m up here with the shiny clean management and their families. Low crime? Try non-existent. So it was unusual, to say the least, to get a morning report about a body bobbing against a pricey porthole high up on C7. A human body, not a stray hunk of rock freed from the asteroid belt. The dome owner objected less to the body proper than to it blocking his view of ore-blasting among the asteroids.

This opening encompasses all three of the keys: world-building, character, and unique element to the crime. The space habitat, the mining industry and the rudiments of a class structure are set out immediately. The point-of-view character’s job and general attitude are on the table up front. No other setting but space allows for the body, and all the evidence the killer left on it, to be perfectly preserved from the moment of disposal. Additionally, the space station serves like one of Agatha Christie’s isolated manor houses: all the suspects and the next possible victims are trapped in one place. The story could not happen anywhere else.

Thus, the essence of a nice, smooth blend of genres: integrate world-building with the lead characters’ actions, which also reveal their attitudes and attributes. Make the crime specific to that world, and the solution unique to those characters.

Jayne Barnard is a founding member of Madame Saffron’s Parasol Dueling League for Steampunk Ladies and a longtime crime writer. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. Awards for short fiction range from the 1990 Saskatchewan Writers Guild Award for PRINCESS ALEX AND THE DRAGON DEAL to the 2011 Bony Pete for EACH CANADIAN SON. Her longer work has been shortlisted for the Debut Dagger in the UK and won the Unhanged Arthur in Canada. You can visit her at her blog, on Facebook or @JayneBarnard1

I Just Love a Good Mystery: The Mystique of the Genre

July 25, 2016

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Amanda Faith Genres Guest Posts Tropes & Archetypes 1 Comment

A guest post by Amanda Faith.

I love a good mystery. Being the detective, following the clues, and arriving at the logical conclusion to catch the bad guy has always held such fascination to me. Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple, Inspector Clouseau, Nancy Drew…these are but just a few of my childhood sleuths that I followed. I couldn’t get enough.

One of the largest draws for me was the fact that I could become part of the story. If the author did their job right, I had to work along side the detective to uncover the clues. It made me work. No, strike that. It would make me want to work.

There are some key elements in a great mystery that should be followed:

A detective that engages the reader. No one wants to be bored reading nor should the detective be a twit.
A solvable puzzle.
A well-done setting
Interesting characters. More than likely, there are several in the book.

Reading mysteries, I discovered that a great mystery has more than one mystery in it. Yes, it contains the “big question.” However, a great mystery also contains several smaller ones to keep the reader engaged, to bring more tension, more problem-solving opportunities, and more ways to introduce red herrings. It also brings depth to the main character (and sometimes the villain). Solving a crime is never neat and pretty. There are twists and turns, wrong assumptions, and initial wrong answers that help the reader stay intrigued. Sometimes it’s good in seeking the truth by showing a lie to propel the story forward.

A mystery must have stakes. There has to be an important, life-changing reason that the unanswered question needs to be answered. The question has to have meaning and weight or there would be no reason to pursue the answer. The greater the problem, the more the tension can grow.

Creating a good mystery can be challenging. There are a few things to keep in mind while writing.

Start with the ending. I have discovered that if you know what the crime, who was involved, and how the bad guy gets caught is important. It will make it easier to create the story to make sure you get to the end game.
A lot of exposition will kill a good mystery. Sure, sometimes it’s necessary. There has to be some exposition to move the story along. However, a good mystery engages the reader. They are part of the story. They are part of the crew to catch the bad guy. If a writer feeds them all the information, a reader will just toss the book aside, bored and hurt you didn’t let them be a part of the takedown.
Do not be unrealistic with the conclusion. The clues, although challenging, cannot be so difficult that a reader cannot solve the case. You don’t want clues to be easy, either. No one reads to the middle of a book and stops. You need to take it all the way home. The reader should be able to go back and trace how things happened to discover how the detective came to the right answer at the end.
Don’t make the conclusion stupid. I say this will all kindness, but things like the assistant figuring it out for the detective, there was an unknown twin, or arbitrarily have a key piece of information appear out of thin air. You can’t hide information. There has to be a hint of a clue somewhere prior to the time the detective unveils it.
Introduce the criminal soon, and the detective sooner. Let the reader know within the first third of the book who the bad guy is so they feel they have enough time to solve the case.

Someone once told me that building a mystery is like the game Jenga (I wish I could remember who). Reach in, grab a block, and pull. Does the story stand? Did you watch it fall apart? This is where the edits come in. You will find all kinds of holes in your story during editing if your Jenga falls down before you get to the end.

I have discovered my love for mysteries has taking me to read about all kinds of mysteries, including real ones. Take the Egyptian Pyrimads, the ruins of Chichen Itza and Puma Punku, or the Lost City of Atlantis. How about the real cases of Jack the Ripper? Amelia Earheart? All of these real-life areas hold a sense of mystery for me. I find that I become lost in the clues and read about what researchers discover.

There are a lot of wonderful authors that transport the reader down a road to uncover the clues and catch the bad guy. Maybe the mystery can be the reader discovering their next great book to help them escape…if only for a little while.

Guest Writer Bio:
Amanda Faith

Teaching high school English by day, college English by night, writing, and doing paranormal investigations doesn’t slow her down from having a great time with a plethora of hobbies. Her published credits include short stories, poetry, several journal articles, her doctoral dissertation, and her award-winning book Strength of Spirit. She is a staff writer for The Daily Dragon at Dragon Con and an intern for Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta at WordFire Press. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English, a Masters in Education-English, and a Doctorate in Education-Teacher Leadership. Check out her website at www.amandafaith.net.

Genre As Immersive Metaphor

July 8, 2016

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Branding Cross Genre Fantasy Guest Posts Science Fiction 1 Comment

A guest post by Martin L. Shoemaker.

“Listen, now. Read this carefully, because I am going to tell you something important. More than that: I am about to tell you one of the secrets of the trade. I mean it. This is the magic trick upon which all good fiction depends: it’s the angled mirror in the box behind which the doves are hidden, the hidden compartment beneath the table. It’s this: There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean. That was it.”

— Neil Gaiman, “Confessions: On Astro City and Kurt Busiek”

What is genre? That’s our topic this month, and you’re getting many answers from many authors, because genre has many aspects. It’s part setting, part conventions and tropes, and more. At a meta level, it’s reader expectations – and to a degree, non-reader expectations: many people have said of my story Today I Am Paul, “Oh, that doesn’t sound like science fiction!” Excuse me? An android caring for an Alzheimer’s patient isn’t science fiction? But every person who said that also said first, “Oh, I don’t read science fiction.” These aren’t SF readers, because they “know” what the genre’s about: spaceships and phasers and light sabers and such.

And that’s, unfortunately, another aspect of genre: it’s a wall people use to divide the world into “books I might like” and “those other books”. Without even understanding the range of a given genre, they decide it’s not for them.

One of the complaints non-genre readers often have is that genre is too clichéd, that the worlds of genre are ridiculous. They like to mock the tropes of fantasy and science fiction, in particular, finding and exaggerating the worst tropes. And let’s be honest: there are plenty of bad examples out there (even if we can’t all agree which ones they are). So they come to associate these bad examples with the very concept of fantastic worlds.

And there I think they’ve missed the mark entirely. By focusing on the worst, they miss the best, and the incredible literary power of worldbuilding, of genre.

What power is that? Let’s start with metaphor.

The Moon hung in the sky, its icy eye glaring down at us and demanding to know: When would we return?

The Moon doesn’t hang. It doesn’t have an eye, nor is it icy. It makes no demands. But as Gaiman tells us: There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean. By momentarily writing statements that are literally false, I conveyed a feeling and an effect that a more literal statement would lack:

The Moon in its orbit remained unoccupied since our last visit.

The same facts are conveyed, but the facts are – like the Moon – dead. In the metaphor, however, the Moon seems alive. Mysterious. Beckoning.

From metaphor, we move to the extended metaphor, or conceit. As the name implies, it’s a metaphor that builds over a longer passage, allowing you to build and explore similarities and contrasts.

He longed to return to the distant fortresses of the Moon: the palace walls of craters, with their mountainous turrets in their centers and their chambers and dungeons mined below. There a man might establish his quiet, airless kingdom, and no barbarians could storm the castle. Not without a space program of their own.

By describing the Lunar craters and central peaks in terms of castles and fortresses, I conveyed (I hope) the POV character’s militarized and somewhat romanticized view of life on the Moon. He’s not an explorer, he’s looking to build a kingdom.

Metaphor and conceit are powerful literary techniques, but I think genre gives us one even more powerful. In a good genre story, the entire world can be what I call an immersive metaphor. The world you build conveys the feelings, moods, and themes you wish the reader to experience.

For one recent example, look to Nnedi Okorafor’s novella “Binti” (excerpted here), winner of the Nebula. It was Okorafor’s first space story; and I heard (secondhand – I’m still trying to get an exact quote) that she said that prior to this story, space intimidated her. It was so isolated.

And when I heard that, I wanted to shout, “YES!”

Of course space is isolated. That’s one reason to tell a story in space: to put a character or characters in isolation and then explore the effects on them, in a story where you can pick and choose the environment to highlight your theme.

In The Lord of the Rings, forests are metaphors for both deep age (old forests with hidden secrets) and yet also spring and youth (the timeless forests of Lothlorien, where the past still lives). In Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, the forest is a metaphor for unspoiled nature before man mars it for his purposes. In both, though, forests are essential elements of the worldbuilding, both as locations and also as challenges. There is room for them to be forests and to mean more.

In a typical cyberpunk story, the crowded megacity is a metaphor for the massive power structures that dwarf the individual, mocking their powerlessness; and the small but stubborn ways the protagonists find to pursue their own goals represent rebellion against that power. Cyberspace represents a frontier right inside the existing power structure, a place where knowledge literally is power. Yet at the same time, these elements drive plot and shape character. They are both world and metaphor, a metaphor that is all around the characters, wherever they look. A metaphor so pervasive, so immersive, that the characters don’t see it. But the readers can, if we as writers craft it into our worlds.

In my own work, I have two recurring metaphors that are also critical elements of my worlds. The first is simple: a character leaping from an airlock. The airlock is a boundary, and a metaphor for decision: Behind you is safety and the known; before you is danger and the unknown; and at some moment, you have to decide to cross that boundary. How a character crosses tells you something about their approach to challenges. Some people might do so timidly, but my characters almost always leap. They trained and fought to explore the unknown, and they’re not going to hold back now.

My other recurring metaphor is microgravity (sometimes called zero gravity, but microgravity is the more accurate term). In microgravity, you can’t walk or stand, you can’t sit, you can’t even lay down. Unless you strap yourself in place, you float; and the slightest force, even air currents, can set you onto a different course. Microgravity is a metaphor for uncertainty and change. How a character manages it can represent either watchfulness and skill or careless naiveté. Nothing is fixed, and you can’t just stand still. If you don’t consciously set your course, forces around you will set it for you. Yet at the same time that it serves as this metaphor, it also presents a physical challenge for the characters, one they cannot ignore.

And this worldbuilding can be a challenge for the writer as well. If you strive to get it right, you become keenly aware of how many ways there are to get it wrong. I write a lot of microgravity stories, and I have to go over every scene in my head. Have I implied that the character is standing or walking? When they swung their arm or shook their head, did I note how their whole body moved in response? If the engines fired, did I portray which direction suddenly became down?

But I like to think that it’s worth the effort. I want the reader to feel the weightlessness, to sense that nothing is fixed and the characters must control their own course. I want the world to be immersive – and the metaphor as well. I want the reader to live briefly in my world – and I want that to mean more than it literally means.

GUEST BIO: Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side… or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that! His Clarkesworld short story “Today I Am Paul” was nominated for a 2015 Nebula and will appear in four year’s best anthologies and eight international translations. His work has appeared in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, Forever Magazine, and Writers of the Future Volume 31.

What Genre Is My Story?

July 4, 2016

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Cross Genre Genres Guest Posts Setting and Milieu No Comments

Guest post by Renee Bennett.

Ever read about a ‘dystopian steampunk mystery’ or ‘epic fantasy conspiracy thriller’ or ‘romantic horror with an ecopunk twist’ or ‘weird West, with zombie superheroes’!

Yeah. Genre is complicated.

When people talk genre, they talk about story content: a love story, or aimed at kids, or contains rocket ships. They mean marketing categories, and marketing categories mean audiences.

Different audiences expect different things from different genres. People looking for love stories want sentiment, kids want kid stuff, and there is nothing so satisfying to the rocket-seekers as a really good blast-off. But what makes each genre what it is? And if you have blithely written a tale of first love between teenagers who are flying to Mars, which genre – which marketing category – does the tale belong to, and why?

It starts with conflict.

All stories have a main conflict. Orson Scott Card in ‘How To Write Science Fiction And Fantasy’ describes a tool to categorize a story’s main conflict: he calls it the MICE Quotient.

MICE stands for Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event. Each story type has its main conflict arise from a different story element. All stories will have all of these elements (mostly; exceptions apply for avant garde or experimental works), but they will weight them differently, depending on what their primary audience wants.

Milieu stories generate their conflict from setting and world-building. This is the conflict engine behind ‘big’ stories – epics, real and fantastical. It is also present in survival stories, war stories, and historical stories. The Lord of the Rings is a Milieu story: its main source of conflict is the motion of nations and the transformation of whole peoples in response to the war with Sauron.

Idea stories generate conflict through the exploration of ideas or information. The main character will start in a state of low information and end in a state of better understanding. The story is a puzzle: once it is solved, it’s over. This pattern is widely used in science fiction, particularly hard science fiction, and in detective stories. Andy Weir started The Martian from the seed of ‘What would happen if an astronaut were stranded?’ and built the rest – including the main character – from elements based on that premise.

Character stories generate conflict from within the characters, or from the relationships between them. They are intimately involved with characters facing – or refusing to face – their lives, choices, and selves. The novel Ordinary People begins with Conrad Jarrett’s return home after having tried to commit suicide in the wake of his brother Buck’s death, and it shows the ways he and his family confront and come to terms with this history – or fail to come to terms with it.

Event stories begin when a chaos agent is introduced into the main character’s life and end when the chaos agent is resolved. This agent can be another character, such as a love interest in a romance, or it can be an object (Maguffin) such as a treasure map or a packet of secret documents, as in adventure stories or thrillers. Consider the movie TITANIC, where Rose’s life changes completely when she meets Jack, and changes again when he dies. Against this, even the sinking of the ship (itself an Event plot) is secondary.

Note that last sentence. In a story which contains more than one plot, one plot will be the main plot, and all others will be subordinate. In fact, most stories will rank them.

For instance, in THE MARTIAN, the Idea of being castaway leads; the next most important element is Milieu, because Mars provides the obstacles main character Mark Watney faces. A number of Event subplots follow as obstacles are encountered and overcome. Watney’s Character was built last, from the question, “Who does this person need to be to survive this story?”

So, how does all this help decide which genre a piece truly is?

The main genres are Fantasy, Horror, Literary, Mainstream, Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction, Thriller, and Western. Each of these lends itself to the MICE Quotient in different ways. Sub-genres can also be ranked this way, but we don’t have space for that discussion.

Core works in each genre tend to rank MICE as follows:

Fantasy: Milieu, Event, Character, Idea.

Horror: Event, Character, Milieu, Idea.

Literary: Character, Idea, Milieu, Event.

Mainstream: Character, Event, Milieu, Idea.

Mystery: Idea, Event, Character, Milieu.

Romance: Event, Character, Milieu, Idea.

Science Fiction: Idea, Milieu, Event, Character.

Thriller: Event, Milieu, Character, Idea.

Western: Milieu, Event, Character, Idea.

You may notice that some of these are similar. Fantasies and Westerns rank MICE items the same, as do Horror and Romances. The difference comes down to expectations and the use of tropes.

Westerns are always set in some version of the ‘Wild West’, either past or present, or in a setting such as the Australian Outback which evokes similar images of rural living, wide open spaces, and individuality. Fantasies, however, do not restrict their settings in this way. They will always contain some other element, such as supernatural beasts or magic, which takes the story out of the familiar world we know and place it firmly in a different one. The changes may be minor, such as vampires living next door, or major, as in completely realized secondary worlds.

If the two genres combine, as in a Wild West Fantasy, then the main genre is considered Fantasy, because it is less restrictive.

Horror always has disquiet at its core. Its inciting Event renders the main character unsafe in body, mind, or both, and the story resolves when the character escapes or is overcome. A Romance Event is explicitly the meeting between main character and prospective mate, and the story is always about the decision to accept or decline that prospect.

In stories which combine Horror and Romance, where the inciting love interest is the Horror element and where the story ends unhappily, the story is a Horror with Romance overtones. Core Romances are comedies – they have happy endings. Unhappy endings are tragedies, which are acceptable in Horror, so the expectations of the audience will be better met there.

And so it goes. Literary works need in-depth analysis and exposition of Character first and foremost, and afficionados of the genre will forgive works which provide excellence in this while scanting everything else, which is why experimental and avant garde works (such as plotless novels) exist. Literary is also the genre which puts a premium on flashy writing for the sake of flashy writing.

Mainstream looks for Character first, but readers of this genre will tolerate only minor deviations from ‘real storytelling’, meaning these works will not scant Events, Milieus, etc. These audiences prefer ‘real world’ events or settings, but the category also contains works which ‘transcend genre’ – which only means the publisher thinks their appeal is broad enough that even non-genre readers will enjoy them.

Mystery begins with a puzzle and the character who will solve the puzzle. In this genre, Idea is better described as Information, where the villain of the piece has all of the information and the hero must discover that information, despite all obstacles.

Science Fiction, particularly Hard Science Fiction, starts with an Idea, a “What if…?” question, and revolves around the implications and permutations of a world in which the answer is “True.” However, Soft Science Fiction, which includes most Space Opera and -punk sub-genres, such as Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Dieselpunk, Decopunk, et al, tends to follow the pattern of Fantasy. Both types, however, have science – or science-like – Milieus, often in the future. Fantasy settings tend to be either past or present, and rarely feature science.

A Thriller always has a ‘thrilling’ element to its inciting Event, usually a matter of life or death and often containing a ‘ticking clock’ against which the characters contend. Acceptable settings, characters, and subordinate event types vary. ‘Typical’ thrillers are set in the present and involve at least one character, main or secondary, who is an agent of authority (government, police, etc.) and whose actions either oppose the disaster or work to assure it. Think spies stealing government secrets, terrorists set on mass killings, or anyone trying to avert a foreseeable catastrophe.

In mash-up work, the main genre is almost always going to be the least restrictive one – the need to abbreviate or eliminate inconvenient tropes will hit narrower categories harder. Combinations where MICE rankings are at extreme odds to each other pose special difficulties: Literary and Hard Science Fiction, for instance, do not mix well because Literary wants deep exploration and description of characters, accompanied by linguistic gymnastics, and Hard Science Fiction wants deep exploration and description of ideas told as simply and clearly as possible. Mixing genres, one must consider which audience is served first and best. A story suited to a narrow audience but marketed to a wider one is likely to be rejected.

But … do what you want. Write the story your way and worry later about its genre; it’s your story first. While I can point out different structures and what audiences see in them, they don’t matter until you have a story for its first and most important audience: you.

What do you look for?

Renée Bennett arrived in Calgary in 1972 and has been endlessly entertained watching the city grow ever since. In 1992 she joined IFWA, the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, and is now their vice president. She runs In Places Between, the Robyn Herrington Memorial Short Story Contest, and coordinates the Author Liaison table at When Words Collide. Her own fiction has appeared on CBC Radio, Year’s Best Fantasy, and Rigor Amortis, among other places, and she has been a finalist in Canada’s Aurora Awards five times.