In this week’s episode, JP and Crys talk about how to write to a specific genre while still creating a unique story.
Question of the week: How do you write the ‘same but different’ within your genre? Share your answer here!
Show Notes
How To Write Funny Characters by Scott Dikkers
Transcript
Crys: Hello, friends. And welcome to the Write Away Podcast. It is December 23rd, 2021, as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain with my cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: Oh, goodness. It feels like it’s been forever since we’ve seen each other even though it’s only been a week.
JP: I don’t know, every week is taking too long.
Crys: And yet speeding by for me at the same time.
JP: Yeah. Yeah, that sounds exactly correct.
Crys: So how have things been for you with writing life?
JP: Good, I think. I’m trying to remember when all of these events happened to try and make sure I don’t repeat myself, but regardless, I was having an issue with the NRD serial and trying to find a good place to put how to structure like the story elements and the plot points. And we originally had this like Google sheets document and it was very cumbersome and very difficult to change on the fly if needed. And we were going to switch to something like Google docs, to do an outline view of that, but that’s too simple and we didn’t want that either.
And then I remembered notion. We’ve used notion so much, you and I, and I forget about it all the time and it literally did exactly what we wanted. So we created this database and each row has a scene and you can click into those and it opens up each separate scene. Wherever you edit, it updates on both the database and on that page. And you can move the scenes around if you need to without too much of a hassle. So like it answered all of the problems and it was fantastic and super easy to move it to. I know that there are a ton of tools for planning, but notions seems to be the one for me.
Crys: I’m definitely going to harass you into recording a screen capture, video capture of an example of that. Not of NRDS, because I don’t want to spoil things, but of that structure.
JP: I guess I can do that.
Crys: Not until the new year. It’s too busy until then.
JP: I’m like, yeah, I can do that in a month. Other than that it’s been good. Things have been like slow but fast at the same time, this whole end of the year makes no sense.
Nothing makes sense anymore. But, yeah, I’ve just been slow and steady progress, which is always a good sign. I have a lot of projects, which I realized today. But I don’t care cause they’re all coming to fruition. They’re all getting closer to being done, which is excellent for me. So how are things with you?
Crys: So this week has been basically off from writing because the kiddo’s out of summer camp/school and it’s Christmas preparations. And I am the type of present purchaser where either I buy everything throughout the year and I’m done by June and I have all their presents in my closet, or I wait until the absolute last minute.
And so this has been an absolute last-minute year. Unsurprising. And so the kid and I went shopping yesterday, trying to buy his presents for everybody, trying to buy my presents for everybody, my presents for him. And I gave up on hiding his presents from him cause I’m like, this is the only day that I’m leaving my house this week. I’m not going shopping again without him.
So he knows everything he’s getting. Hopefully he forgets, but he’s at an age now where he actually remembers things. And I don’t know if this is enough of a topic for a future episode, but it has made me like wonder, especially for us writing in fantasy worlds, what are the holidays that are unique to our world building? I don’t generally think of them and I don’t include them. They’re so important to the human experience, but that’s not our topic this week.
JP: I do like that topic though, but we’ll talk about it another day.
Crys: I was like, my answer right now would just be like, I only just thought of it so it’s not a full podcast.
But this week we are going to talk about: how do you write to genre, but still be unique? How to be same but different. And you brought this one to the table. Do you have any initial thoughts?
JP: I can’t remember, I think this came up in a mastermind discussion in one form or another, but I am a firm believer that there’s two ends of the spectrum, where either you go full formulaic, everything meets all convention, or you go and you basically spit in the eye of all conventions and you forge your own path.
And I think that in order to, for me, for what I want to view my success, I fit on that spectrum somewhere either in the middle or especially now in my earlier days, being closer to that formulaic side to garner the attention of people that are expecting the same kind of stuff. Because realistically, like when we go to see mystery movies, action movies, fantasy movies, we have these expectations. And the more that you ignore those, the more likely that your audience is not going to like it, if that makes sense.
Crys: Yeah. A hundred percent. And it was funny when we were having this conversation, my mind literally went blank on all the tropes that I know. Even though romance thrives on tropes, like that’s how you market your books for romance.
The tropes are often characters or pairings or situations. So there’s the secret baby trope, which is a couple accidentally has a baby, but one of them, clearly the dude in a heterosexual couple, doesn’t know about it. It’d be really hard to do a lesbian romance where there’s a secret baby. They’d have to work real hard to get those kiddos.
Others are simply like the characters job, or if you have a series it’s like a firefighter is considered a trope, construction workers considered a trope, but like a political consultant would not be because it’s a trope when it is repeated over and over in multiple fiction stories. But my brain, for some reason, when we had this conversation was just like, I don’t know, the only trope I could think of is kill your gays. And I hate that trope. But there’s also fringe the only interesting lady, which those are the tropes that like I hate. And that’s a side conversation about tropes, but that’s one element in which your book can be same but different. Like you can choose which tropes you have. You can choose which tropes you don’t.
Others are character archetypes. So particularly fantasy and sci-fi, we expect very particular character archetypes, in different versions, different ways. One of the ways that you can shake up your book with same but different is having those character archetypes not performing the same exact roles that they do in other fantasy books.
JP: Yeah, one thing I found when I was looking up stuff for this was basically breaking things down into convention and then trope. And in conventions you have things like your character archetypes, your elements of the story, the setting, and the obligatory scenes. And then your tropes are basically your means to extrapolate that information that becomes commonplace.
When you think about like in fantasy, there’s almost always a mentor character. A trope for that mentor character is old man with a beard. So that’s the trope is the means in which like the most people have been using it and now it’s quote unquote overused. But that mentor archetype is something that is almost an expectation for fantasy.
Crys: I think the author’s name is Marcus Bradis, and on an episode of Writing Excuses, and I couldn’t tell you, I think it was season 14 at some point, but he said he in his books has for his mentor character a magical redneck and that’s his mentor character. You have the archetype, but you shake it up. You make it unexpected.
JP: Yeah, I definitely think that’s the best approach in trying to be same but different is focusing on what are the common tropes for your genre and try to subvert those, change those up. I would be less inclined to change obligatory scenes or certain character archetypes that everyone would expect.
Crys: I think another way is to say, okay, what are my strengths as a storyteller slash what are my external interests that don’t really have anything to do in the genre, and how can I bring them into my writing to refresh it?
So like for me, one of the things that makes me extremely happy is writing specifically neurodiverse or physically diverse characters, in that they might be differently abled. I think I’ve talked about this before. One of the last romance books I’ve written, it was painful to write until it included the main character had a sister who had cerebral palsy. And being able to pull the information in and give myself a chance to research things, it takes that book from okay, here’s a stock romance book to, hey, here’s a stock romance book with some interesting things outside of stock romance.
JP: Yeah. And that makes me think of the movie, Single All The Way, that came out on Netflix because that is like formulaic love story that you would expect to see from like places like Hallmark or like Lifetime, a hundred percent, except the characters are gay.
So they just subverted the character archetypes and basically made them male.
Crys: Yeah, I haven’t watched it yet. I will, promise.
The other thing that comes to mind is Stranger Than Fiction. You have very strange characters, right? But you make a lot of the jokes, the interactions, very particular to the characters. And I’m thinking of the scene, and if you haven’t watched the scene it’s a spoiler for you. I’m terribly sorry, came out years ago. He brings her flowers, but she’s a baker, so he brings her literally different bags of flour. So we have this romantic gesture and you make it very particular to the characters. So any in jokes.
Another example is The Good Place, which is one of my favorite TV shows of all times. And they put so many philosophy jokes in there and just accept that their viewers will understand that. They don’t try and dumb it down. They just, they put them in there, they put them into the flow. And it could have been a very stock story about a mix up between heaven and hell. And they did so many things to elevate it. But that is one way that comes to mind.
JP: Another one I was looking into was fantasy setting because the expectation is almost like medieval world. And I think that you can find comfort in writing that medieval world, but I think that some of the new fantasy elements that are coming out where it’s places in different regional locations or using just completely different styles and settings all together has really made a new and breath of fresh air into the fantasy genre. So I think that even thinking about like where you come from. Because for me, I have a lot of like Scandinavian history, so I would really love to write something that’s more Scandinavian focused as opposed to like central European, just to add that slight flare to it.
Crys: Anything outside of being like British based is really like you’re already taking one step away. If you step away of Western Europe, which is like the UK, Spain, France, Italy, and Germany, take another step outside of that, then you’re like two steps away from the standard. Years ago, I read an urban fantasy that was mostly set in Slovakia, which I loved because I spent a summer in Slovakia.
You’re two steps away from the norm there. And I just, I love that.
JP: Yeah. And it just adds a new flare to it and gives room for others to realize like, oh, I can write like that too. That’s the kind of stuff I like is the fringy stuff. The stuff that’s on that other spectrum that I can be like this might be something that I’m either interested in or something that I want to emulate.
Crys: Particularly if you’re an author who finds a lot of joy and research, which both of us happen to be, that’s a really great way for you to take your book out of that super same and move it to a little bit different is to find a place that you love, that you have roots to, and let yourself go wild researching it. Cause you’ll find a lot of those little things that we talked about, like things particularly with characters, and things particular to the setting, that you can pull in and take your story to the next level.
And this is a brand thing, but it’s like, how do you be same but different? How do you provide the readers the emotional journey they want, but give them something new enough that they don’t feel like they’re just rewatching the same thing over and over again, rereading the same thing over and over again? And so when you give them characters in a situation or in a place they’ve never been or that you’ve never been, not them, maybe the characters lived there their entire life. You’re giving them a lot of fresh new information that keeps it interesting to the right kind of reader, that reader that you are looking for.
JP: Definitely.
Crys: Anything else?
JP: I think that conventions play a really big role. If you were to break everything else down and just think about what are the key concepts for the genre that you want to write in, if you are writing is genre that is basically an expected genre, so mystery or any of those kinds of things.
Like what are the conventions that are the base minimum and then build from there. Now if you’re going to do a genre mashup or forge your own path, that also includes looking at what the elements of those two, three genres are and trying to find common ground to build up from. I think that if I wanted to do something that was outside of the box, I would probably at least start there with a framework and build from there.
Crys: And I will say to people that one of the things that conventions are really useful, other than writing your book, is selling your book. Because that’s the thing that you’re going to hook reader’s attention with most of the time. Because readers will be like, oh, I love that trope. I love that convention. I don’t know if this is easy to do in most contemporary fiction, but you still have the life falling apart and climbing from the ashes, you have the everything is currently falling apart and how am I going to deal with it? Like those are conventions. And if you know what like main conventions you’re working from, that gives you a lot of good information on how you’re going to write your cover copy and yank those readers in and be like, okay, here’s the convention and let me sprinkle in the differences in the description so you know what you’re getting. So they literally are thinking, even if they don’t know that they’re thinking this consciously, this is the same, but different.
JP: And I think too, it’s going to be dependent on your audience because there may be a different audience within the same genre. But if, for example, you’re writing romance and there is no happily ever after at the end or it ends terribly, you are going to alienate all of the people that you’ve claimed that this is a romance for. You may find people that like it, but I doubt it.
Crys: They will tell you through and through, this is not a romance. A happily ever after, at least happily for now, is a required convention of romance.
JP: Yeah. And there was a time where, and this is back to movies because this is where my framework for everything comes from. But there was a time where a lot of post-apocalyptic movies were coming out and the endings were always dismal. And for a while, to me, that was alienating because I was just coming from a bunch of post-apocalyptic movies where the endings always had that little ray of hope. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere someone was like, let’s subvert this. And everyone else followed them.
And I remember those movies. I will not watch them again because it’s like, well, I really enjoy movies that make me feel like trash at the end of them. That’s really my goal in life. So II would just suggest, think about what those conventions are, I think, especially about beginnings and endings and how that audience takes to those. Because do you want something that someone reads and they’re like, that was good, but I don’t think I’m ever going to pick this up again? Or do you want someone that might reread it or might recommend it? If you really want to write that book that makes people have that feeling at the end of it, but they don’t ever want to touch the book again, go for it.
Crys: Thank you so much for joining us this year. This is our last episode of the year, which is insanity. But we will be back next year in just a short week. We do have our book club for January chosen, and that is How To Write Funny Characters by Scott Dikkers. And we’ll have a link to that in the show notes.
If you’d like the opportunity to join us for the live recording, you can check us out on Patrion. The link will be in the show notes. Thank you so much, everyone.
JP: See you later.
This links to the audio for episode 79