Being a Better Writer: Blending Different Genres · 9:26pm Sep 17th, 2018
Hey readers! Welcome back to the start of another week! I hope you all had a pretty good weekend! Mine went well. In fact, I’ve got some good news for you.
For starters, Frigid-Reviews asked me to do a special spotlight on how I worldbuild. You can find it over on their site, as well as a number of book reviews—including reviews for Shadow of an Empire and Colony!
Second, Unusual Events: A “Short” Story Collection is on sale today for 99 cents! This price will slowly climb back to the original price over the course of the week, so grab it while it’s cheap!
That’s it for news! Plus, there’s a lot for me to do today, so let’s just dive right in to today’s topic. This topic is … well, it’s a bit of a broad one. I’ve noticed that with these request topics things seem to go one of two ways, broad or extremely specific, so in the future I think I’ll scale back the amount of requests a little to hit some more traditional writing topics as well.
But that aside, this topic is a bit broad because the question behind it concerns genres and how to use them. Specifically, how to mix them together. To get even more specific, the initial question wanted to know how to mix genres that didn’t mesh together, but … Well, I disagree with that. Almost. But since I can’t explain that without a whole lot of other context …
Yeah, let’s just dive in.
Thinking on it, the genre that I am really wary of is probably crossovers. Oh yes, I did like it initially coming onto this site, but at this point so many fic authors have started this or that and never ever finished the stories that it really doesn't seem interesting anymore. Especially if they do multi-crossover story as a collab and the other author(s) disappear.
Would also say there's a difference between genre-blending and genre-slide. Where as the former is when a story has been established as a mix of two genres, the latter is when a story takes a shift to common themes of another genre. The only one I can really think of off the top of my head is romance, where the romantic-plot-tumor comes into play.