Isaiah, 2YN Week Two: Genre

Though making these kind of big-picture kind of decisions at the beginning of the process has been difficult for me and felt a bit unnatural at first, I think I'm learning to really like the idea. Taking the time to answer these questions - "What's your idea?", "What kind of book are you writing?", "What do you want to say?" - at the beginning, thoughtfully and thoroughly, is making me really analyse things and not just run ahead with an idea that's not as clear as I think it is. I think I'll be able to write a much stronger book because of it.

Asking for other people's opinions on my assorted summaries was an interesting experience. There was no consensus as to which type of story was the best or mose intriguing - in fact, I got one vote for each before I started to get any repeats. So there was no obvious answer, but everyone's reasons why they liked the ones they did, and their suggestions, were very helpful. In the end, #1 won with 3 votes. I was pleased with this because, based on other comments and my own ruminations, I had pretty much decided to go that route anyway, at least in tone and theme, while still pulling plot elements from some of the other summaries.

So - my genre will be urban fantasy, using magical elements such as shapechanging and vampirism in modern Reno. My tone/subgenre will be mythical.

One of Each, Please

So I finished my summaries, one for each type of urban fantasy I could think of. The only problem? I like them all, and I want to write them all. :) I'm letting them percolate, but I'm also curious to see what you lot think. Let me know which one or ones are your favourites, and, if you like, why.

Read here: http://skadhisgydhja.livejournal.com/35581.html

Exploring Possibilities

So this week's assignment for the 2YN plan is to determine the genre & subgenre of your story. I know mine's urban fantasy - that's been clear to me from the first blush of the idea - but to me that doesn't narrow it down enough. Should it be truly fantastical - almost mythical - in the style of Charles DeLint or Jane Lindskold's Changer? Should it me more like a harboiled mystery, like Tanya Huff's Blood Ties series? Should it be dark, nearly horror, like her Smoke series? Should it be lighthearted and romantic, like Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries series? Or could I shift the whole thing and make it science fiction, instead?

This had me completely stumped. How the heck should I know? I thought about it for ages (I actually started down this path during the last assignment, while trying to figure out the central conflict, so I was a bit dismayed to find out that this was the next task.) To me deciding what type of novel I wanted to write - genre and theme and plot - was all one huge dilemma, and I couldn't find any loose threads with which to start unravelling the knot. All of the options had potential, and none of them felt exactly right.

Finally I decided that what I needed to do was actually explore all of these possibilities rather than trying to decide which one was the perfect version of the story before moving on. So I'm writing a summary of the story specific to each - what? sub-sub-genre? tone? I'll just go with type - type of story and, at the end, I'll decide which one looks best or like the most interesting to write. It's actually going really well and it's a lot of fun.

This idea is probably ridiculously obvious to those of you who plot ahead of time, but it's kind of news to me. :) I guess that's why I'm doing this whole Isaiah exercise.