In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Hierophant to guide their discussion. They discuss the different tips and tricks they use to discover the obligatory scenes of their genre and how they use them to develop their stories.
Question of the week: What are the obligatory scenes that you are working into your current work in progress? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes
Conventions and Obligatory Moments for Genre By Shawn Coyne
Writing for Your Id by Jennifer Barnes
Transcript
JP: Hello friends. This is episode number 90 of the Write Away Podcast and it is April 7th, 2022, as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost…
Crys: Crys Cain.
JP: How’s it going?
Crys: It’s going pretty well. My brain is scrambling, like what have I done this week? Cause I have not put any time into writing the fantasy which I’m chastising myself for and that’s what I’m going to try and focus on today. But I did get some more on the next romance book with my cowriter.
I’ve moved forward on German translations. So I have a translator, we have a verbal agreement. I have to create the contract on Upwork. And the way Upwork works is you can set milestones to issue payment throughout the life of the project. So we’ll set up a project for the entire series and then each new book will be a new milestone. And so we set the budget for each book and the deadline, and then once they complete that milestone, they get paid.
Now, one of the interesting things about Upwork which I haven’t dealt with before because normally working with freelancers as an author, we just pay each other through PayPal most of the time. When you work through Upwork, you have to put at least part of the money. If you’re doing milestones, you put the first milestone in escrow, the amount for the first milestone in escrow.
So you have to have the money for your project ahead of time. They don’t get paid right away, Upwork just holds it. And that way everybody knows that the money at least exists for them and you’re not going to screw them over. That does mean that I have to wait to start the project until next month because I need some more money to roll in for my comfort of what I have in the business bank account. But I’m pretty excited about that.
JP: Yeah, that’s really cool. I didn’t know that about Upwork and that makes sense for those kinds of projects where you may not necessarily know the other person very well. Yeah, interesting.
Crys: How about your week?
JP: It’s been a good week. I finished the art project that I was working on for someone, and I’ve already started the works of the second art project that I will be working on. I’m just kind of figuring out what that’s going to look like. That is a huge undertaking, and I’m excited for it. And I’m going to keep that mysterious because why not?
And I’ve been doing edits on the short story because I’ve been able to push aside the client work cause at the moment, I don’t have anything that’s coming due. So I’ve been able to work on the short story, get the edits in that I want to make it go from good, which it was, to like excellent because I’m trying to add in a lot of pieces cause it’s our leader magnet into the series that we’re writing. So I just want to add a bit more to it. But that’s been fun and I’m really close to being done with it. So yay! And then I got to go back into edits for one and then throw it into the wind.
Crys: Excellent. I forgot to add one of the most significant changes to my week is I now have Smalls in after-school care for an extra two hours a day, and that has definitely saved my last couple of days because sleep schedule has been whack, so I have not had the energy to start working until like about 11. And if he were not in this afterschool thing, that would be about an hour and a half of work that I’d be able to get done. But now I still have close to four hours of work, which is like my desired focus time each day.
JP: That’s good. Excellent. And he’s having fun with that?
Crys: Yes. He says, “I help babysit.” Cause it’s just younger kids in the program with him. There’s five of them. Yeah, it’s pretty funny.
JP: Awesome. That’s good. I’m glad that you found something that you can use as an option.
Crys: Indeed.
What is our card this week, JP, that is guiding our question?
JP: The Hierophant.
Crys: What the F is a Hierophant?
JP: A Teacher. Yeah, so let me give a couple quick descriptors about what this card is. So I think I might have said that The Magician was the counterpart to The High Priestess, and I was wrong. The Hierophant is the counterpart to The High Priestess.
So if we think about The High Priestess, it’s very much the internal spiritual journey, your own intuition. It’s kind of more personal and spiritually attuned. Whereas The Hierophant is the masculine counterpart, the Pope, the teacher. This one is the outside religious figure that’s teaching various different things about spiritual wisdom. Key words are spiritual wisdom, religious beliefs, conformity, traditions, institutions. It’s very structured.
And then obviously reversed it would be those personal beliefs, that freedom, and challenging any sort of conformity. It’s often depicted as someone like a religious figure sitting between two pillars and a temple, and in this very like teacher position. I think it has two fingers pointing towards the heaven and two towards the earth, kind of being that conduit between spiritual wisdom to the others.
So that is the gist of The Hierophant.
Crys: So, we’re taking the idea of this character being a leader, a guide, and we think about something that guides us as we write and that’s obligatory scenes. And would you mind explaining what you mean by obligatory scenes? Because there’s a lot of people who mean different things when they say obligatory scenes, scenes that are required in your story.
JP: Yeah. So when I think about it, I think about it through the lens of genre. So there are some expectations when it comes to genre that I believe people should use at least like 80% of them in order to define that their book fits within that genre, if you are trying to write to genre. All of these stipulations. But ultimately it’s a way to convey how your book sits on the shelf. And if you plan those obligatory scenes ahead of time, you make it way more clear as to where that can sit and you can find an audience, in my opinion, faster.
Crys: Can you tell me some obligatory scenes that you have used for like your urban fantasy?
JP: Yeah. So we have basically like an academy urban fantasy. So if you think about that, what does that look like? So we pull on things like The Winx saga from Netflix, or like Harry Potter, or any of those sort of academy things. You have obligatory scenes where they’re learning something in a classroom. Sometimes you have teachers that are sketchy, questionable, especially if you’re through the lens of the younger audience there are some adults that seem untrustworthy and there are other adults that don’t seem to be paying attention, and only these kids can solve the mystery.
So there’s those kinds of dynamics when you think about it. And usually a little bit of romance. We were trying to steer clear of that, but then we realized the more and more we were writing and realizing what we were writing, we figured there has to be a little bit of romance to it because almost all academy urban fantasies have romance. So those were the obligatory pieces that we added to it.
Crys: Yeah. And romance, there’s a book called Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes, and it is one of the books I recommend. And it’s basically 20 plus somewhat obligatory scenes. But if you’re talking about the overall for romance, your obligatory scenes are going to be your meet cute, your first kiss, your dark or gray night of the soul, your reconciliation, almost always between the dark night of the soul and the reconciliation there will be a mirror character moment where the side character reflects truth back to the main characters about the situation. What other scenes filter in tends to depend on like their specificity on what your sub-genre is.
JP: I have a question for you because through Serial Fiction Show I’ve asked a lot of romance authors this question, and that’s the happily ever after. Is that obligatory to you?
Crys: If it doesn’t have a at least happily for now, then it does not qualify as a genre romance. It might be a love story. Like Romeo and Juliet is not a romance. It’s a tragedy because it does not end in a happily ever after. Anything by Nicholas Sparks is not a romance, it’s a tragedy. Yeah, you are required for a genre romance to have happily for now or a happily ever after.
JP: And that’s what all of the romance authors said that I talked to. And I just found that interesting because as someone who doesn’t write in romance, that almost seems like if I didn’t have those conversations and I was like, yeah, I’m going to write a romance, I probably wouldn’t do the happily ever after because I would think that I was doing something new or something different. But happily for now or happily ever after is obligatory to the romance genre. So it is a very hard-set structure that readers of the genre expect.
Crys: It is not uncommon for someone who is not obsessed with romance to come in and say, I’m going to write a romance, but I’m going to upset it and they’re not actually going to get together. And for most romance there’s other rules. There can be no cheating once the couple has recognized, like has at least subconsciously recognized, their interest in each other. There’s a whole bunch of like big no-no’s.
JP: Yeah. And that’s what defines the genre. That’s what puts it together and really defines what the expectations are, what the rules are, what the authority is behind that genre. Sure it’s all made up, but at the same time, that’s what readers are expecting. And there are some things you just shouldn’t be upsetting.
Crys: Now, one is the things that I’ve struggled with as I look at new genres is how do you figure out what those obligatory scenes are without like immersing yourself in reading a hundred books?
JP: I think you need to read three. Yeah, I’m going to be honest. Three is a good number. Three offers some type of data. It’s the bare minimum for science world. But if you’re going into a new genre that maybe you can’t find obligatory scenes for, reading three books that fit that genre and writing down what happens in each one and see what commonalities fit between them is a really good way of figuring out if something is, or isn’t, an obligatory scene in that genre.
Crys: How many of the obligatory scenes do you need?
JP: I found this Conventions and Obligatory Moments for Genre by Shawn Coyne on some website, but I was just reading through it and there are a couple, like science fiction and fantasy, he only has listed like five. Others like romance, there’s about 10. I think realistically, it’s those hard-hitting pieces, those things that are so common among them that you can just point right at them. When you think of like science fiction and fantasy, almost everyone has a moment where they’re “not in Kansas anymore”, where something happens and the world that they knew it is odd. It’s different, something has changed. There’s a huge conflict that has altered the perception of the main character. I would say 90% of science fiction and fantasy has that, which makes it an obligatory scene.
Crys: I will caution anyone who goes to look up the Conventions and Obligatory Moments for Genre by Shawn Coyne, that the way that story grid, which is the structure he works under, defines genre is not how we define commercial genre. So you just have to be aware of that. Otherwise you’ll get confused out the wazoo.
JP: Yeah. In this article, it goes down into the action-adventure internal stuff, and I didn’t pay attention to that. It has mystery, horror, science fiction and fantasy, romance, those things. I feel like those you can at least see if you think of like, what have I read under this genre and you look at this, you can probably apply almost everything.
Crys: Yeah, and I don’t think we’ve mentioned it on this podcast, but I’ve been really interested in Jennifer Barnes’ Id List. And if you want to know more about that, you can give it a quick Google search, there’s a couple of blog posts. She has a $6 hour long talk she did at an RWA meeting that you can buy and download that’s really spectacular. It’s about figuring out what are those images, those scenes, those characters are as a way to connect your readers that they’ll just really love.
Like do you just get super excited when something set in that Gothic mansion? That goes on your Id List. And obligatory scenes are sometimes in alignment with our unnecessary plot moments, right? Like our inciting incident, our midpoint, our final climax, they’re sometimes in line with that, but sometimes they are just scenes that give us the good feels that are the reason we go to that particular genre or sub-genre.
JP: Yeah, definitely. And I would say too there are always opportunities to turn the obligatory scenes on their head without having to completely oppose or be different a hundred percent from them. If every romance ended the same happily ever after then it would be boring. Romances have figured out how to approach that happily ever after and make it look different for each character, each story.
And I think that’s the key is figuring out where these like bare bones expectations are and then figuring out how you can turn them. Like turning a mentor from an old, wizened wizard into a young spunky immortal girl, that’s something very different, but yet it still fulfills that mentor character that people expect to see within those a fantasy and science fiction genres.
Crys: I’d like to ask our listeners this week, if you have not considered what are the obligatory scenes for your genre, take some time this week and do that, and then let us know what are the obligatory scenes that you are working into your current work in progress?
JP: Definitely. And that’s super fun and super awesome for community things when people are like, Hey, I want to write into this genre, and they don’t know necessarily. If multiple people answer with different genres, look at that, we would have a list.
Crys: All right. We are going to go record our business question this week, which is: what have you rebelled against in your author business and found success with doing things that go against the current?
If you would like to listen to that episode, you can check out our Patreon, which the link will be in the show notes.
u063a7
hexcbp