Archive for the 'Essays' Category

Dialogue

Dialogue is composed of three things to make it good.
1. Reveals something about the character using it.
2. Moves the plot forward.
3. Contains how the character talks and their manerisms (personality).

Sub Genres v. Cross Genres

First, a genre is a category of artistic composition. For literature, this tends to be about setting and what the characters are doing.

For example, a Mystery is a setting where someone has done a crime and the characters have to solve it.

A Cross genre is where one takes a genre that exists and is defined by publishers and then crosses it with another genre. For example, Fantasy Mystery would be something such as an elf found a fairy dead, so he has to solve the mystery. Science Fantasy is another cross genre. It’s not a sub genre. It’s taking Fantasy and Science Fiction and crossing them.

A sub-genre is usually looking specifically at the setting and then defining what the setting is made up of. Setting itself is made up of place, time and theme.

Place can be divided into larger place (Earth, this universe, etc), general place (Country, suburban, Urban) and specific place (Name of the city, town, village, etc).

Time is usually Historical, Modern, Contemporary, Futuristic.

Theme is such things as Dark, Paranormal, Magic Realism, Comic, etc. This is the sensation that people are left with as they are reading the story.

It is true that some sub genres tend to have *some* of the other types of sub genres, however, it does not mean one cannot have Paranormal in the Country (Bram Stoker’s Dracula) or Paranormal in the Suburbs (Buffy the vampire Slayer) or Urban in Historical times (Set it in Ancient Rome…) or in a Futuristic place or in an Alternate History. There is nothing mutually exclusive about setting your fantasy in a city and having a different theme and time. There is nothing in the word “Urban” that says you can’t make it funny or Dark, or have to be 100% gritty. It’s a place. It’s not a time period.

I hope that clears things up. One last thing about genres. Genres are used by publishers to market books, so when they classify a book as “Urban” fantasy, they believe the main attraction for that book will be the “Urban” aspect. However, this does not mean it’s not also other sub-genres. That’s just merely their classification so they can appeal to buyers.