Category Archives: Making Progress as a Writer

Hybrid Genres

Cross Genre Fantasy Guest Posts Mixing it Up 1 Comment

A guest post by Anthony Dobranski.

What’s a hybrid genre? You won’t often find hybrid works marketed as such, since there are only so many aisles in the bookstore. Look in — and across — the larger genres’ shelves, however, and they appear more and more. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels rank as Amazon best sellers in historical fiction and time travel romance. Charlene Harris fused mystery and horror fantasy in the Sookie Sackhouse series, and won top mystery awards for it. Tor.com now has a column for hybrids.

A hybrid genre story uses essential elements of two or more genres, in a single story that honors the audience’s expectations for its parent genres, but also questions them — or at least plays rough with them.

My forthcoming novel The Demon in Business Class is a hybrid fantasy, a modern-day story of magic and the supernatural, in the international setting of a corporate thriller, with a romance that changes the story but also completes it.

I wanted to write a fantasy about my own place and time, the way Wilde set The Picture of Dorian Gray in Victorian England. I live in an amazing era, the dawn of the networked age, a far happier adult world than the Cold War nuclear winter feared in my childhood, and a world more open to many kinds of people. It is also a time of cultures clashing violently, of heartlands that feel abandoned by elites, on all sides. Lately we’re hearing from globalization’s discontents, and I don’t discount their grievances or suspicions. I worked in international business, however. I saw its good side, its optimism, the way it helped humanity shift from Cold War us-vs-them absolutism to complex morally-unsatisfying alliances that feed and clothe more than war did.

I had the sudden bold idea for a novel, a difficult romance between supernatural corporate rivals representing moral opposites, a fantasy for a time of change and ferment, both chaotic and intoxicating.

The problem is, that’s a mess of a story, a weird assemblage that invites yet leaves unsatisfied the expectations of three different genre audiences. Here are just a few:

  • Magic — the directed use of supernatural power to achieve a goal — changes any society where it is public.
  • In fantasy, a heroic and vigorous culture overcomes a decadent if powerful one.
  • What would a business with magical powers advocating a moral polar attitude… sell?
  • Corporate thrillers require a big corporate conspiracy, whose goal is either money or power.
  • Romance is about individuals.
  • Romance disallows villains. Anti-heroes, yes, but even they must be morally improved by love.
  • If the opposition is truly polarized, each has to find something repugnant in the other — which makes romance hard.
  • Romance ends a romance; exposure ends a corporate thriller; in a clash of good vs. evil, evil has to lose.

You’ll have to wait until this fall to see how I got all those narrative questions and more all resolved, but it took witches, playboys, gangsters, cultists, a prophet, two angry angels, and a very modern Tarot deck – along with several rewrites and the help of committed beta-readers!

Along the way, though, I discovered some principles that can help you develop your hybrid genre story:

Know what you want. A story speaks to humanity through genre norms, but if you’re so flagrantly violating the norms of a genre, you’re doing it for a reason. If you don’t know what that is, it’s hard to work it into your story. It doesn’t have to be an easy reason to explain. Mine was so hard to explain that I had to write a novel to do it. It’s what binds all your other ideas together, however, so be clear about it.

All plates keep spinning. A hybrid tale gives your characters multiple arcs, and none stop, though some can slow. Think through where the character needs to go on each arc to see how to weave them together.

Genres themselves are as diverse as insects. Even a seemingly niche category like “sci-fi with aliens” encompasses 2001, Pacific Rim, and Aliens — each of which also belongs to a wholly separate sub-genre (hard-SF, kaiju, and bug hunt) with different ways to show heroism. Even if you want to apply a genre “norm,” there’s more than one way to go about it.

Don’t forget the writing. You are writing one book, but as your genre elements shift, your writing can shift with them. This is a chance to play, to satisfy yourself and your audience with the style to go with your story. Be terser in the thriller elements, festive in the social moments, vulnerable in romance, quick and cutting in anger.

Don’t fight a genre — use it. Genre demands and tropes can enliven your story, if you use them creatively. To have a romance that worked out, I couldn’t make my fated opponents the primary actors for or against a worldwide conspiracy, its James Bonds or its Blofelds — but I could make them a small part of such plans, maybe even a bigger part than they knew, while still giving them believable loyalties and higher stakes.

Consider the genre’s own influences. Noir and cozy mystery differ in setting and tone, but also in the social class and status from which their stories view their societies. Looking past the symbols to their hidden meanings gives you new perspective on how to refit elements to your story. Because —

It’s still all your story. We’ve been talking about genre norms and conventions as if you’ll get issued a citation from the genre department. You won’t. You have incredible creative freedom – if you stick your landings.

Are you writing a hybrid genre story? Talk about it in the comments below!

Anthony DobranskiAnthony Dobranski is an author from Washington DC. His first novel, The Demon in Business Class, comes out this fall from WordFire Press.

Mashing Up the Wild West

Horror Ideas & Plotting Mixing it Up Setting and Milieu Steampunk The Writing Life Tropes & Archetypes World-building No Comments

If you’re of a certain age in the U.S., you were raised with Westerns. John Ford and Sergio Leone filled cinemas and TV screens with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, the dust of cattle drives, the thunder of cavalry, guns, and the war whoops of Indians. By the time of my childhood, Western films were in their declining years, covering ground so well-trodden the genre itself had become cliché, a collection of easily recognizable and increasingly tired tropes.

However, the genre never quite made it to the grave. Since the Western film’s heyday, we’ve been graced with some spectacularly good fare: Tombstone, Unforgiven, Tarantino’s Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, the remake of True Grit, the HBO series Deadwood, and Dances with Wolves.

The things that these examples do exceedingly well, and I would submit to you, the reason they’re so damn good, is that they take the tropes and twist them. Unforgiven puts an unforgettable twist on the Hired Gunfighter. Tarantino’s characters are nearly all recognizable archetypes—except they’ve been subverted or twisted in unexpected ways. The Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit takes Charles Portis’ brilliant novel and puts little Maddie Ross squarely back in the protagonist’s seat. Deadwood so brims with fascinating characters, crackling dialogue, and Shakespearean tragedy that its cancellation after only three seasons is one of the great travesties of modern television. Dances with Wolves, with its sweeping grandeur, epic depth, and visionary cinematography, is credited with revitalizing the Western film, and it does so by turning the tables on the Indian Wars. Without this film, none of the others might ever have been made.

But just how far can you twist the tropes? Can you have a science-fiction Western? A horror Western? A fantasy Western? Absolutely. Mix in any of these ingredients and you have what has come to be called The Weird Western.

The earliest sci-fi western mash-up that comes to mind is Westworld, complete with android gunfighters. Another notable is Back to the Future Part III, which nowadays we might call a little steampunk. The Wild West is a favorite milieu for steampunk authors, forming their own sub-genre of Western mash-up, including the Fictorians’ own Quincy J. Allen. Are there other SF-Western examples? Sure, but we won’t talk about Cowboys and Aliens.

Horror is a spice that mashes up tastily with Western stories. The Old West is replete with ghost tales and Native American mysticism. Murder, injustice, and brutality abound, all fodder for stories of the unquiet dead. Haunted trains, phantom stage coaches, vengeful medicine men, ancient knowledge from the dark depths of human history… are your creative juices flowing yet?

So the first step to a good mash-up is to recognize the tropes. You have to understand the nuts and bolts of a genre and how they fit together into the moving parts of the story. Throw in the things you love, the things you want to write about. A sprinkle of vampire saliva, a touch of decomposing zombie, a love story between a man and his raw meat, an angry deceased mother-in-law.

Twist and subvert the tropes into interesting new shapes. Take the Town Marshal archetype and do something with him you’ve never seen before, something interesting, something fun, something unexpected. In Death Wind, we made the Town Marshall an old man, too stubborn and grumpy to admit he’s forty years past his prime.

This kind of subversion is not new. Even in the 19th Century, the Western genre had become staid and cliché. The profusion of dime novels and penny dreadfuls had already created the tropes and archetypes we know today. In 1898 Stephen Crane, author of the Red Badge of Courage, wrote a brilliant subversion of the Western in his short story “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” in which he plays with tropes like the Town Drunk, Town Marshal, and The Shootout with great insight and cleverness. The key to any good mash-up is play. Jam things together to see what works, what sounds fun.

Death Wind CoverA few years back, my friend Jim Pinto and I decided to collaborate on a screenplay. We wanted to do something neither of us had ever seen before, so we decided to mash up two genres we loved: horror and Westerns. But how to make it different from other notable horror Westerns around, such as The Burrowers and Ravenous? We threw in another ingredient we both loved: the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. And that’s when the fun really began. We were in undiscovered territory. Throwing together a collection of characters under-represented in Western fiction and film, we stirred them together into a juicy stew of crisscrossing conflicts and ended up with Death Wind, a screenplay that placed highly in several screenwriting contests, including Second Place at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival Cthulhu Con in L.A. and Grand Prize at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose in 2012.

After this success, it was a no-brainer to adapt the script into a novel. Death Wind will make its literary debut at Dragon Con 2016, published by WordFire Press.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Heermann-6Spirit_cover_smallTravis Heermann’s latest novel Spirit of the Ronin, was published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind (co-authored with Jim Pinto), The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Apex Magazine, Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including content for the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and EVE Online.

He recently returned to the U.S. from New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and toting more Middle Earth souvenirs than is reasonable.

You can find him on…

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Genre Misconceptions

Cross Genre Fantasy Guest Posts Mixing it Up Sean Golden The Writing Life 1 Comment

A Guest Post by Sean Golden

Warrior“Hey! I hear you wrote a book. What kind is it?”

“It’s an action-filled story with interesting characters and devious plot twists.”

“No, man, I mean what genre is it?”

“Oh… well, it doesn’t really…”

“Is it fantasy?”

“Yeah, epic fantasy… I guess.”

“Oh, I love books with spells and elves and swordfights!”

“Oh, actually, it doesn’t have any of that.”

“But you said it was epic fantasy, man!”

I can’t tell you how many times I have had that, or some variation of that, conversation since publishing the first two books of my epic fantasy series, “The War Chronicles.” In fact, the two publishing houses I submitted it to both identified its lack of a clear genre designation as the reason, or a major reason, they decided not to publish it. In effect they said “If it doesn’t fit genre expectations, it won’t sell.”

I would call that the biggest genre misconception. I believe a great story, written well and properly edited, will find readers. In fact, it is frequently the genre-bending books I’ve read that have the most lasting impact on me. Many books that are now considered hallmarks of their genre, were genre-benders in their own day. Tolkien’s elves, deep world building and epic scope essentially created the genre people think of as “epic fantasy” today.

Recently one of my writer friends asked if their story had strayed too far from the genre expectations of the general fantasy reader. I said “You’re asking the wrong guy. My epic fantasy novel is set in a stone age culture where the main character is a flint-knapper and there isn’t a spell in the entire series.” And that story, self-published and practically un-promoted, sold enough to qualify for an SFWA membership.

The second biggest genre misconception that I see is the idea that genre distinctions are accurate. If you go into any library, you will find “Star Wars” in the science fiction section. But the Star Wars story is at least as much, if not more, fantasy than sci-fi. In fact, it has virtually every major classic fantasy element. Mysterious magic wielders in robes? Check. Magical swords of awesome power? Bingo. Conflict between “light” and “dark” sides of some universal, guiding, supernatural “Force?” No kidding. A young protagonist unaware of their uniquely awesome powers? In spades.

Which brings me to my last genre misconception. And that is the idea that a writer should write to a genre, instead of just writing the story they have inside them. That approach, in my opinion, is a major reason that people lose steam and end up not finishing manuscripts. Instead of listening to their inner muse and following the story where it goes, they worry about genre expectations and try to “check off the boxes” to ensure that they cover the genre they want. That approach can make writing feel restrictive and take the joy out of the endeavor.

My advice is to write the story inside you, and not worry about genre definitions, expectations or guidelines. That will help you stay excited and focused on the story, and no story will ever get published, if it doesn’t get finished.

Sean Golden:

Sean Golden is many different things. Father, husband, writer, programmer, project manager, gamer, crafter,fisherman, amateur astronomer and too many other things to bore you with. He took a year off from the grind of corporate cubicle farms to write “Warrior” and “Warlock,” both available on Amazon.com. The third book in the series, “Warlord” is in the final stages of writing now. Sean has a BS in physics from Louisiana State University and had the second highest rated rogue on his World of Warcraft server after taking down the Lich King, and then retiring from raiding.
Read more from Sean Golden at Www.seandgolden.com

 

Game of Thrones and the Permission to be Unpredictable

Balancing Acts Character Craft & Skills Fantasy Kristin Luna Mixing it Up The Fictorians The Writing Life 5 Comments

*Contains no spoilers for the current season, but does contain some spoilers for past seasons.*

 

I love Game of Thrones for the reason everyone seems to hate it: no character is safe. You can’t be sure if your beloved favorite character will survive the entire season, or will die in a completely unexpected way. And at the same time, you don’t know which awful character will be victorious in his or her pursuits, making it that much harder for your favorite character to survive.

Game of Thrones started off innocently enough. Sure, I screamed “Noooooooo!” at my television along with everyone else when Eddard Stark was beheaded, but that’s not enough to make me quit watching (although, can someone write Sean Bean a character that doesn’t die, please).

Fast forward to season three. I’d been enjoying a fantastic season so far, updating my husband as it went along. He had read the books years ago, and I knew he had read at least the first two or three. The first time he had thrown one of the books across the room, he had just read Eddard Stark’s beheading.

So my husband surprised me when he asked if we could watch Game of Thrones together one Sunday night. And like a naive fool, I felt excited my husband actually wanted to watch it with me! As the episode went along, I almost felt guilty because it was turning out to be a so-so episode, not the most exciting I had seen. Then, we came to the part of the episode with a wedding. Robb Stark was supposed to wed one of Walder Frey’s daughters, but handed that *honor* over to his cousin or somebody.

Violin music started, and I said out loud, “You know, I have a weird feeling about this.”

“Oh?” my husband asked innocently.

As we watched on, the insanity unfolded. My husband watched me as I gaped, horrified, to the end, through the credits, and continued to watch me as I stared at the blank screen in total silence.

“And now you know why I threw the third book in the series across the room,” he said and turned off the television.

For days after, my mind reeled with possibilities, replaying the scene in my mind. I felt horrified, shocked, and so very sad.

But I didn’t feel betrayed. I felt satisfied because George R. R. Martin, the show’s creators, and cast made me feel, and feel very deeply.

Think back to the hardest thing you’ve ever gone through in your life. A blind-siding break up. The death of a loved one. Losing a part of yourself, whether physically or emotionally.

Now consider the reason it happened. Chances are, and more often than not, the reason doesn’t feel good enough. It feels flimsy, unbelievable. Sometimes, there is no reason. No reason at all. It just is.

During the Red Wedding and all subsequent twists in Game of Thrones, I didn’t feel betrayed by George R. R. Martin,  or by the writers and producers of the show David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. The moments they create continue to shock me, and the story continues to captivate me and draw me in. Because, just like life, just like the real world, the show and its creators promise nothing. Sometimes people die. Horrible, unspeakable things happen to some of the characters. But the story keeps on turning, keeps on spinning. Ironically, that’s perhaps that’s why so many people feel betrayed by Game of Thrones. They expect entertainment, but instead are shown too many situations true to life in the real world.

Although Martin wasn’t the first author to do it, I’d argue Martin is paving the way to make unpredictability of mortality acceptable in epic fantasy.  In the coming years, I’ll expect to see many more deaths of main characters because that’s what keeps readers and viewers on their toes. It’s what bridges the gap between fantasy and the real world: unpredictability.

As writers, we often feel that certain things aren’t allowed. We aren’t allowed to make our readers sad at the end of a book – it’s almost taboo. You’re supposed to leave them with a lift, right? Leave them with hope, closure. But life doesn’t always close a chapter with hope and happiness. George R. R. Martin knows this and teaches us an important lesson with Game of Thrones: It’s not your job as a writer to make your readers (or even your editor or publisher) happy with your story. It’s your job to make them feel.