Genre – Page 3

Can I Jump on the Bandwagon?

February 1, 2018 By Catherine McKenzie

Random fact: A bandwagon was literally a wagon that carried a circus band. Or so says the Internets. They were part of circus parades at first, and then politicians discovered them, as politicians are wont to do. According to todayifoundout.com, here’s what happened next:

“Politicians started to use bandwagons in parades through towns on their campaign trails. It’s believed that Dan Rice, a famous circus clown, was the first to rent out his bandwagon to a political campaign.

As a campaign became more and more successful, other people and politicians sought to rent seats on the bandwagon and ride it through town. In doing so, they received face time with the public and believed that the success of the original campaign would rub off on them.

There are records of the phrase used in political speeches throughout the 1890s, usually in the form of warning potential voters not to ‘jump on the opponent’s bandwagon in haste.’ Because of the negative connotations associated with the phrase, many didn’t admit to having a bandwagon of their own despite it becoming common.”

(Emphasis added because ‘famous circus clown’ is my new life goal.)

And hence, the phrase “jump on the bandwagon” was born. Cool!

So, why am I telling you this arcane bit of etymology? Because I want to talk about genre, and specifically, genre-bandwagoning (Is that a thing? If not, it is now!) and it’s opposite: genre-abandoning.

Imagine that you’ve been seized with an idea. One of those Ideas, ideas that won’t leave you alone. You write your story without worrying too much where it fits in the market because, hello!, that’s what we’ve told you to do and you’ve been listening. You write and polish and beta, and then there you are with your bright, amazing story that you are ready, finally!, to take out into the market. And then your agent (if you’re lucky enough to have one), or some well-meaning book-friend tells you, “No one’s buying Steampunk[1] anymore.”

Ka-chunk. (This is the sound my brain makes when I’m panicking. It’s kind of like that sound in Law & Order, only scarier).

“But, but, but,” you say. “There are Steampunk novels sitting at #1 and #2 on the NYT right now. And this is my best work ever.”

“Sure, the last gasp. Editors are buying for 18 months from now.”

“So what are they buying? What’s the next trend?”

[Insert Agent/Friend shruggie here.] “They don’t know.”

“But, but, but, I saw in the deal news that here were, like, at least two other Steampunk titles sold this week.”

[Insert Agent/Friend giving you “the face.” You know, that face that makes you feel like a moron so you don’t ask what the face means. To quote/paraphrase Watson in Sherlock. “No, I don’t know what that means. That’s why I find the face so annoying.”]

You decide not to ask any more questions. You slink out of the meeting you were excited for feeling slightly sick.

But what do you do (I mean, after the drinking)? You have to do something. Do you simply accept that Steampunk is over and stick this novel right in the drawer (along with the others)? Do you push back against the rising tide and insist that your agent take the novel out anyway? Or do you cast wildly (and widely) around looking for the next trend, one that you will hopefully hit right as it’s peaking?

Damned if I know.

[That would’ve been a good last line, right? A little bleak, maybe, but sometimes you need to take it to a dark place. But okay, okay, I have more to say.]

This is the problem, I think, with the advice that I myself have given: Don’t worry about genre or trends or what is going on in the market: Write what’s calling to you. And of course, that is the right advice in many ways. I’ve made the point before that the author of Fifty Shades of Grey was not sitting there examining the market to figure out that there was a hole in the market that needed to be filled with BDSM-Twilight-spin-offs. She created that trend. But there’s also the reality that if she’d written her novels after that trend had come and gone, we’d never have heard of Christian Grey.

This is one of the reasons that my biggest advice to writers and want-to-be-writers is [Read more…]

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Five Ways Television Can Help Us Become Better Storytellers

November 28, 2017 By Grace Wynter

Television gets a bad rap. Some of it is deserved—I’m looking at you Sharknado—but some of it comes by way of the rarified air some writers breathe. You know the air; it smells a little like antique books and pretension. It’s the air that convinces some of us that if the masses consume it, it can’t be any good.

Sharknado notwithstanding, there is good television out there. There are widely-known, critically acclaimed shows like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, and there are lesser known shows, some long-canceled, like Firefly and A Different World, that changed the way viewers engaged with each other and the world. What these shows have in common is their ability to entertain, and we can learn a lot about writing—and our writing careers—from studying them. In an effort to keep this post from being the length of a novel, I’ve focused on a showrunner, two shows, and commercial breaks to provide examples of how television can inform the way authors write and share stories.

1) Shonda Rhimes and the power of a recognizable brand
If you’ve watched anything on ABC over the past few years, you’re probably familiar with Shonda Rhimes. Her shows, Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How To Get Away with Murder, have been rating powerhouses for ABC, reshaping the network’s evening lineup. But what we can learn from Shonda extends beyond powerful writing. If Shondaland, Rhimes’s production company, is associated with a project, viewers know to expect strong but flawed female leads, a diverse cast, and soap opera-like drama. This is Shonda’s brand on ABC, and she delivers it faithfully to her dedicated fans. Know your audience, create what they enjoy, brand it, and repeat.

2) The West Wing and characters we care about
This Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning TV show is a master class on pacing, dialogue, and creating characters people care about. Here’s a scene that accomplishes all three.
[Read more…]

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Selling Sprawl: The Case for Expansive Storytelling

November 20, 2017 By Vaughn Roycroft

Geeks are rejoicing! In fact, a weeklong epic fantasy geek-gasm is ongoing even as I type this essay. But if you’re not one of us, you probably haven’t noticed. That’s because we epic fantasy geeks aren’t really the party-in-the-streets sort of revelers. Instead, we’re the disappear-in-our-caves-and-read-the-newest-big-fat-book types. And the big fat book that instigated this round of rejoicing is no ordinary epic. We’ll be in our caves for some time.

Last Tuesday, Oathbringer was released—Brandon Sanderson’s latest edition to the wildly popular Stormlight Archive. And yes, it’s his biggest, fattest yet, weighing in at 1,220 pages. And get this: Oathbringer is the third in a planned ten-volume series! Talk about ambitious.

The Stormlight Archive isn’t just long, it’s expansive—a story-world with 30 systems of magic, dozens of cultures, and 6,000 years of history mapped out. In the first two editions there are over a dozen POV characters (though there are merely three to five protagonists, depending on how you count them). The themes Sanderson is weaving are not just socially-conscious, but in my opinion are extremely relevant and applicable. They include climate change, religious dogma versus evidence-based science, the politics of oppression, and making war for profit, to name a few.

Epic Inspiration

I’m not here today to sell you on The Stormlight Archive. The series might even be considered daunting by some fantasy fans. But I do want to share how heartened and inspired I am by its success. And I also want to share a few thoughts on the trend in my genre toward more expansive storytelling.

These days it seems there is no shortage of readers out there who are undaunted by a sprawling tale. This is good news for many fantasists. But for me, Sanderson’s success with Stormlight is particularly inspiring. You see, he started writing the first draft of it fifteen years before the publication of the first edition in the series, The Way of Kings. Prior to that, he sold a standalone fantasy (Elantris) and a trilogy (Mistborn) set in the same universe (or the Cosmere, as he calls it)—not to mention being hand-picked to finish Robert Jordan’s popular Wheel of Time series following Jordan’s untimely passing—all before he undertook revising The Way of Kings for publication.

Talk about accomplished. Talk about prolific!

And yet, as lauded and productive as Sanderson is, I see a bit of my own journey in his. And when I say “a bit,” it’s not mere diffidence. Sanderson wrote fifteen(!) novels before getting published. So far, I’ve written five. After Elantris was published his editor read a version of The Way of Kings and thought it was too ambitious—particularly for a second novel. Even Sanderson has said he wasn’t a good enough writer at that time to pull it off. Likewise, my gut tells me that when I wrote and revised my first trilogy, A Legacy of Broken Oaths, I wasn’t good enough to pull off. And so I moved on to write other stories in the same world—one of which I hope to sell. But I still have hopes for LOBO.

Brandon Sanderson’s success with The Stormlight Archive keeps that hope alive. [Read more…]

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Writing a Memoir

November 13, 2017 By Sophie Masson

I was born into a family where stories were all-important. Not just stories you read in books, though those were much loved; not just stories about imaginary people and magical lands, though we adored those; but also the stories that had made us who we were—stories of the family. As a very young child, I lived with my grandmother in France while my parents were away working in Indonesia, and she told stories of her past. Later, living with my parents in Australia, I heard many stories of their pasts, and the family pasts stretching well beyond them, into the mists of the centuries: in my father’s case, right back into the sixteenth century. Secrets and dramas, tragedy and comedy, big characters and twisty plots: they all featured in the family stories and we could never get enough of them. Later still, I told stories of my own past to my children, as well as passing on the stories from my parents and grandparents and way back. It was a natural thing to do, and it still is. And what I realised was this: the fact that I was brought up in that ferment of family story not only grounded me in my identity, it also had the effect of heightening my own memories of childhood and adolescence so that later, as a writer for children, I had a deep and authentic well to draw from, for my fiction.

But fiction’s one thing. Memoir is quite another. And writing stories about yourself and your family, for public consumption, is also quite different from telling them within the family. There’s so many things you don’t need to explain within the family, but for strangers to understand, to enter into the very personal world you are recreating, you need to at least set the scene. Memoir is written usually in subjective first person; but you need the third-person objective eye, too, if it is to communicate to readers and succeed as a work of art. [Read more…]

Lessons Learned from Ruby Dixon: How to Write Sex Scenes That Readers Can’t and Won’t Skip

October 16, 2017 By Jan O'Hara

Write fiction for long enough, and eventually you’re going to land on a storyline that requires you to address a sexual relationship between characters. If you write in a sweet, mannerly style in which sex only happens once all major story questions and conflicts are addressed, you might get away with writing closed-door sex scenes. (In fact, some readers specifically seek out this kind of read, and some writers have learned to telegraph this experience in their title, cover art and back cover copy.) But if your voice is earthy or sensual, or if your characters’ world is rife with sexual politics, you’re probably not going to get away with a decision to fade to black. Try it, and your readers will protest outright. Or they’ll give your book a low rating, feeling vaguely dissatisfied because they didn’t get the payoff to the setup implied by the rest of the book.

Let’s assume, then, that you’ve decided your genre, voice and storyline require one or more sex scenes. Let’s further assume you’re going to work through your feelings about your parents/boss/worship leader reading your work. The question then, becomes How? How do you craft a sex scene that goes beyond the mechanical insertion of Tab A into Slot B? How do you write sex scenes that are a necessary part of the storyline and thus, material that your readers can’t and won’t skip?

While I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, my understanding has grown by studying another author:

At a recent seminar I attended, when talking about authors who manage their social media with panache, a fellow writer mentioned the author Ruby Dixon. A figure rendered somewhat mysterious because of her anonymity, she is reputed to be a NYT-bestselling traditional writer by day, and by night, under her pen name, a bestselling independent writer of Sci-Fi romances.

I went to Ms. Dixon’s Facebook page to watch how she interacted with her large and dedicated audience. (Sadly, I am no closer to understanding how some writers fascinate whereas I maintain the charisma of a boiled chicken breast.) Before long, I ended up buying several books in her Ice Planet Barbarian series to see if I could identify what had earned her a rabid readership. Then I realized that the series’s setup makes it an ideal place to learn about compelling sex scenes even if, like me, you don’t write Sci-Fi romance.

Science to the Rescue?

Remember in the scientific method how you attempt to hold all environmental factors stable, save for one? Then any variation in the results can be attributable to the sole fluctuating factor? Well, because of her world-building, Ms. Dixon’s series inadvertently holds a number of variables steady, making it possible to see what creates fascination and shapes mood within a sex scene.

The series premise is that a cadre of Earth women have been abducted by aliens who intend to sell their captives off as exotic pets and sex slaves. Fortunately for the women, a weather event forces them to be temporarily abandoned on an ice planet. They soon come to the attention of a benevolent tribe of mostly male, smart, and socially progressive hunters. (Aside from being blue, and having an extra body part with erotic potential, the men are remarkably humanoid.)

Unfortunately for the women, to handle the planet’s toxic atmosphere, they must enter into an irreversible symbiotic relationship with a worm-like creature specific to the planet. The act of accepting the kihue, which lodges in one’s chest in the vicinity of one’s heart, both seals off any chance of escape from the planet and obliges the participant to engaged in a compulsory form of matchmaking. For once two parasites determine that a (heterosexual) couple is fertile and compatible, they “resonate” within their hosts’ chests. The resulting song is the very public signal of an upcoming period of biologically enforced lust, and if all goes well, an imminent pregnancy the male will do his utmost to protect.

While there is a larger arc to the series as the humans and barbarians integrate and fight common enemies, each book is devoted to the Happy Ever After of one particular couple.

Had she wished to avoid writing graphic sex scenes, could Ms. Dixon have done so?

Unlikely. You have a world of Stone Age men for whom discussion of reproduction and mating is routine and connected to the tribe’s survival. (Before the Earth women’s arrival, a relative dearth of females meant the tribe was on the verge of extinction.)

The external conflicts driving the story in the larger world have mortal stakes. It would be odd to have the reader inhabit a gritty, realistic story world then suddenly, when it came to sex, be asked to retreat to a closed-door sex scene.

Also, notice how the setup creates conflict-ridden themes ripe for exploring within the context of a newly formed couple.

Here are a few thematic examples:

consent in a world of arranged mating
importance of tribal wellbeing versus an individual’s identity and independence
importance of traditionalism versus openness
possessiveness versus protectiveness
desire for privacy versus public stakes
romantic love versus biological primacy

Fortunately for the expectations of her readers, and anyone who would learn about sex scenes from her, Ms. Dixon is willing to “go there” multiple times within one book. And despite the comparatively few sex acts possible within a given coupling, she delivers wildly divergent experiences for each bonded pair—divergent both in meaning and tone.

All this, in a world where the following remain consistent:

the author’s voice and worldview
the physical consequences of the kihue’s resonance
with few exceptions, because of the hostile environment, sex acts must occur in caves on furs, meaning that setting variation can’t play a huge part in the emotionality of the scene.
because the men all come from one tribe, they tend to use the same language for body parts, sex acts, etc. So if there is an appreciable difference in mood between pairs of lovers, it’s not coming from variations in the male’s language around sex, or their understanding of sexual mechanics.
again, because of the commonality of experience, the men don’t have much divergence in religious or cultural beliefs.

Given All the Above, How Does Ms. Dixon Make a Sex Scene Count and Avoid Repetition?

[Read more…]

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