The Society Genre

August 9, 2017July 10, 2017 / kaitlinbevis / Leave a comment

The Story Grid, genre chart, #amwriting, #amediting

Society Genre stories tend to be idea stories, and there’s a lot of interplay between them and dystopian stories. They’re often used to present an argument for or against a political argument, they tend to be of the “let’s follow your logic to its conclusion” slippery-slope thought process.

These tend to focus on multiple POV’s to get a better look at how the issue impacts others, but that’s not a requirement. Some of the most famous examples only follow one character.

These absolutely require a sub-genra, so the specific beats are going to be dependent on which sub-genre you go with. The Handmaid’s Tale is absolutely an idea story and a society story and a woman vs. society story and a horror story and so on.

Some sub-genres within this sub-genre include, Domestic Society. This focuses on the family dynamic. The core value tends to be the well being of the individual vs. the family unit. The core event tends to be a showdown where what’s good for one clashes with what’s good for all.

Women’s Society tends to concern the struggle of the individual woman versus the patriarchy. The core event of the story is the rebellion or submission of the female protagonist (think Handmaid’s Tale).

Political Society (I would argue all of these are to some degree political, especially women’s society) deals with the struggle for power. The core value is power vs. impotency, and the core event tends to be a revolution. This Les’ Mis, though that also falls squarely under…

Historical Society where any one of the above approaches is used but in a hind-sight being 20/20 kind of way. For this genre to be successful, it needs to be applicable to the modern day. Like how The Crucible, a story about the Salem Witch Trials, was also about McCarthyism. Coyne goes on to say that “using historical details enables the writer to comment on a particular taboo or highly charged moment in contemporary life through the prism of the past.”

Coyne also lists biographical stories within this genre, but I think biographies are something unto themselves. It just depends on how the person telling the story decides to frame it.

The thriller genre

July 12, 2017June 13, 2017 / kaitlinbevis / 2 Comments

8bc792d8-2e75-41bb-8a92-fc3f2c745a67 The thriller genre is a mashup of horror, action, and crime. Writing Excuses described the difference between a mystery and a thriller as whether or not the reader knows who the bad guy is and what they’re up to. In a mystery the driving force to turn the page is curiosity. In a thriller, it’s dread. You know what’s coming, the protagonist doesn’t. Like horror, thrillers often go beyond life and death to fates worse than. But a thriller also tends to be a bit more grounded than horror. The villains a bit less like Voldemort and more like Umbridge. He’s out of this world horrifying, she’s the evil you know. Thrillers tend to be more character driven than an action novel because when the stakes are personal (i.e not a bus full of screaming children) and worse than death, you have to care whether the protagonist lives or dies.

The protagonist of a thriller tends to be the heroic type who would throw themselves down in front of that bus of screaming children to slow it down as opposed to the everyman protagonist of most horror novels. The protagonist also tends to be deeply sympathetic, often because they are a victim of some kind.

There’s as many different flavors of thriller as crime, action, or horror. It’s the tone, the stakes, the characterization, and the reader’s knowledge that differ. You can plug in all the windows dressing of a espionage adventure and make it into a thriller. But next week, I’ll discuss a few of the old standbys.

The Action Genre

June 14, 2017May 31, 2017 / kaitlinbevis / Leave a comment

Book cover for The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne, #amwriting, #amediting, book review, how to write, how to edit Action stories tend to have big stakes and often (but not always) include explosions. That the protagonist’s life is on the line is a given. Generally so are the lives of other people and monuments. The mind-hack, as Howard Taylor would say, that you are trying to achieve in an action story is an adrenaline rush. A sense of breathlessness that keeps you turning the page. There are tons of great YA action stories. James Dashner, James Patterson, and Scott Westerfeld in particular have done very, very well in YA action.

The most pivotal moment in an action story according to Coyne is the “hero at the mercy of the villain scene.” But more on that later.

These days, very few stories are just one genre, but a carefully crafted blend. You can have a pure action story pretending to be another genre, or you can have elements of action in another genre. So as you read the following list of sub-genres of action, keep in mind you could have easily seen these elements before in a romance or a mystery or a horror novel.

Subgenres

Man VS Nature – The natural (or unnatural) world is working against your protagonist. This is often a one-sided struggle. The volcano neither knows nor cares about the people getting roasted to the bone.
- Straight Environment. This is your natural disaster movies featuring volcanoes going off or earthquakes or asteroids hitting the earth, or couples getting abandoned on a ski-slope or left out in the middle of the ocean scuba diving.
- Monsters. As long as the monsters aren’t consciously thinking and plotting against the protagonist, monsters count as a Man Vs. Nature. Zombies and Pod People are great examples of this. They just exist. Yes, they want to eat your protagonist, but it’s not personal. There’s no reasoning with them. Monsters also include non-supernatural animals, like sharks, bears, or birds.
- Mazes. If your protagonist is stuck somewhere/must retrieve something from a place, then the place itself can loom as an antagonist for a time. There’s generally a bigger bad (whoever put the item/protagonist in the maze). Think Saw 2. Saw 2 is Man Vs. Man without question. But the house of horrors he set up was a labyrinth the characters had to work their way through. That was a very tense blend of the two types of conflict.
- Time. Coyne puts this in a separate category all by itself, but I disagree. Time is absolutely nature, even if it’s imposed by another man. (Then it’s just cross-genre). Time is often used to raise the stakes in pretty much every other conflict story. Want to ratchet up the tension in your Man V. Man story, introduce a ticking time bomb or a random deadline. Or put time on your side, if your characters can just stall long enough, reinforcements will arrive. You can make time an actual antagonist, like in 11.22.63, or Back to the Future erasing people if anything changes.
- Doomsday. Coyne adds another sub-genre he calls the doomsday plot, where the victim is the environment. He references Independence Day as “the hero must save the environment from disaster.” I disagree with this sub-genre. By my definitions (which do not have to meet yours), the environment as a victim is a stake, not a point of conflict. The conflict in Independence Day was with the Aliens, not the bits of Earth they blew up. And even then, the character’s concerns weren’t really with the monuments that got blasted, but the people who were left buried in the rubble.
Man VS. Society – These are stories in which the protagonist fights against a social structure, not just an individual person. Most dystopian fiction falls into this category.
- Rebellion. In this plot the hero or group of heroes openly rebel against their society, but most often they rebel against a specific figurehead in that society. The Hunger Games was against the entire system, but it got personal between Katniss and President Snow.
- Conspiracy. In this plot, the hero or group of heroes fights an enemy that other’s don’t see, but are absolutely a product (and most of the time the price) of the society. There’s generally a sense that if they had just never found out the dirty secret, if they could just forget, they could go back to a perfect life. And unlike in a rebellion plot, where most often the heroes are driven to rebellion by an evil force, it is arguably a perfect life in conspiracy plots. Uglies is a great example of this.
- Vigilante. One person is, for one reason or another, the only bastion of goodness left in a society that is so corrupt it cannot fight crime through normal measures. There’s often a hefty bit of Man V. Man in this as well, but society is also to blame for allowing this to brew. Batman and Daredevil are both good examples of this.
- Savior. Again, I disagree with this definition. “The hero is against someone who wants to destroy society.” That’s a stake, not a conflict. And if the thing that wants to destroy society is society, then it probably fits better into one of these other genres.
Man VS Man. Your character VS. Another character. Most stories eventually personify the villain in the shape of a person (think President Snow in an arguably Man V. Society plot arch). But they tend to stand in as a symbol for all that’s wrong. In straight Man V. Man, they aren’t the symbol of what’s wrong, they are the thing wrong.
- Rivalry. This is your Man V. Man played straight. One can be good, one can be evil, or they can both be ambivalent. Man V. Man applies just as much to Batman and the Joker as it does to Suitor A Vs. Suitor B in a love story. Suitor B doesn’t have to be evil, just working against you.
- Revenge. The hero chases the villain to right some wrong. “You killed my father, prepare to die.”
- Hunted. The villain chases the hero to right some perceived wrong. “You were somehow inadvertently and sympathetically responsible for killing my father. Prepare to die.”
- Machiavellian. Two villains duke it out while all the little people run for cover (Freddy V. Jason).
- Collision Plot. Two sympathetic, heroic characters duke it out while all the little people run for cover. (Batman V. Superman).

Enjoy action stories? Action is definitely a subplot in the Aphrodite Trilogy. Now that Venus Rising is live and Aphrodite is on sale for .99 cents, you can get the whole trilogy for under $10! So if you haven’t caught up on Aphrodite’s trilogy, now is the time to do so.

The Horror Genre

May 31, 2017May 22, 2017 / kaitlinbevis / 1 Comment

Book cover for The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne, #amwriting, #amediting, book review, how to write, how to edit The horror genre goes beyond life and death and explores the fates worse than. The mind-hack, as Dan Wells would say, that you are trying to evoke in your reader is a sense of fear and dread. According to Shawn Coyne, the key scene in any horror story is “the victim at the mercy of the monster” moment, and the thing that set the story in motion is the attack of that monster, real or otherwise, that forces the protagonist out of their safe zone.

The object of desire in horror tends to be survival, both in the literal sense and the coming back from the edge of sanity sense. When the protagonist doesn’t care about their own life, a small child, woman, or dog tends to be thrown into danger to spur the protagonist into action.

That antagonism between the forces of good (or neutral) and evil are king, and the antagonist must, according to Coyne, always be evil. An evil that can’t be reasoned with. The horror subgenres tend to be broken down by the way the story explains the monster. Reminder, these subgenres can mix and match within or out of the horror genre. You can have a romance with a horror subplot, and you can have a horror with a romance subplot. It’s all in how the writer divides it.

Subgenres

Uncanny – The forces of evil in the story cannot be reasoned with, but they can be explained. Think serial killer plots.
Supernatural – These are stories in which the monster isn’t “real” or explainable. Possessions, hauntings, vampires, werewolves, those kinds of monsters fall under the Supernatural category, but in my opinion, this is where the most genre bending occurs. If you have a supernatural villain in a fantasy setting where werewolves are totally a thing and everyone knows it, then the werewolf if uncanny, not inexplicable.
Ambiguous- The reader can never be quite sure if it is the supernatural at work or not. These stories tend to question the protagonists sanity on a deeper level than the outsider looking in a supernatural story. The Babadook is a good example of this. Was there really a monster, or was the monster symbolic of the mother’s depression?

External Conflicts and Goals

May 24, 2017May 22, 2017 / kaitlinbevis / 1 Comment

Book cover for The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne, #amwriting, #amediting, book review, how to write, how to edit External conflicts deal with conflict outside of your protagonist. That’s the villain, the earth quake, the monster. Your character may grapple internally with how to handle the conflict, but the object of conflict itself is not happening in your character’s head.

External goals are the obvious goals that drive the story forward from the inciting incident on. Ralph’s medal, destroying the one ring, ect. It’s a tangible item or other person that’s easy to identify, and while it drives the plot, it’s ultimately secondary to the intangible changes made within the protagonist along the way.

That tangible object and conflict is going to vary genre by genre. In an action story, it’s going to be the villain and the thing central to the villain’s plan. In a love story, it’s going to be the character of desire, in a crime story, it’s going to be the criminal, often with the object being sought a victim whose time hasn’t yet run out.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll get into the external conflicts from several different genres that are outlined in Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid, along with some examples of my own.

Literary VS Commercial Novels

February 22, 2017January 20, 2017 / kaitlinbevis / 1 Comment

Book cover for The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne, #amwriting, #amediting, book review, how to write, how to edit

In chapter five of The Story Grid, Shawn Coyne talks about the differences between literary and commercial works, and it’s pretty common sense, but he did have some insights I wanted so share.

So first, a quick primer.Writing Excuses had the best explanation for literary fiction versus commercial, or genre fiction. In literary fiction the focus is on the craft, the word play, the things being accomplished by the text. Genre fiction is all about the story.

There’s a prevailing attitude that literary fiction is better than genre fiction. And in form that’s likely true. But that’s really not a fair comparison because the two have entirely different goals. If a literary fiction novel doesn’t pull your attention to the clever tricks of the words on the page, it’s failed. If a genre fiction novel pulls your attention off the story long enough to dissect the wordplay, then that’s a problem.

Think of it this way. Two people are making their way down a path. One is racing, determined to get their very best time. They are ultra focused on their form, the way their feet touch the ground when they run, everything matters.

The other person is out for a walk to enjoy the pretty scenery. They are taking the time to look at every plant and flower, smelling the fresh air, basking in the sunshine.

There are similarities between the two. They are both using feet to propel them down the same path. They can learn from each other, use tips and tricks from each other to better meet their goals because the ground rises and falls beneath them identically. But it would be foolish to criticize the racer for not stopping to smell the flowers or the walker for making such terrible time.

The similarities in base form aren’t the only thing that make it tempting to compare the two unfavorably with each other. Literary fiction is what is often taught in the classroom. While literary fiction is still being written, because of the way writing adapts and changes, some genre fiction will become literary fiction as time goes by. Historical context, out of fashion writing styles, and impact of the novel itself has a lot to do with what is viewed as literary. Conversely, a lot of high brow literary stuff was once upon a time looked down upon as over rated genre fiction.

Coyne goes on to explain that within genre fiction, the largest consumers are women. Women’s fiction is historically the best selling fiction genre, followed closely by (and sometimes including) romance. That fact is why pretty much every novel ever written contains a romance regardless of genre. Authors and publishers want to attract the most possible readers. Recently YA has made some massive waves and is changing the market place, so I’m curious to see what conventions change down the road.

Most helpful to me in this chapter was Coyne’s explanation on how he selected which books to acquire for his publisher by focusing on the recent sales of each sub genre within his genre of genre fiction. You should absolutely check it out in The Story Grid.