Genre Math

This is going to be an unashamed process junkie aimed post. I love digging into process, and I bet some of you do, too. What I specifically want to talk about here is how I, personally, build prose per project.

First of all, I do consider every prose project unique. Given that I like to shape my prose accordingly. The differences could even be small, to most people, but to me they make or break a story.

One of the first things I’ll do is what I’ve taken to calling Genre Math. I look at the story I am setting out to tell and try to figure out where it lands across various genres. Maybe the story is a mix of horror, comedy, and high fantasy. Each of those has general structure that readers know to help them identify and feel right for the genre.  Is that necessary? Not 100% of course not. You can write horror that has the earmarks of mystery even with a mystery involved. You can do anything you’d like, let’s be honest here, and if you do it well it will work.

I just like to start my structure this way.

Looking at this story I will then take the genres (in this case three) and try to weigh each in the story. The horror is a big spine piece so let’s weigh it at 50%, and the comedy is more important than the high fantasy so 30% comedy and 20% high fantasy.

This has nothing to do with the world building itself, remember, this is just for structural prose purposes.

Once I have that breakdown in my head I start to play with the sentence structure tropes in the given genres and layer them over each other, going harder or softer on different ones based on the weights I assigned them.

A lot of horror, for example, might have shorter set-up sentences in a paragraph with longer, visceral, reveals sprinkled. High fantasy tends towards a certain verbosity of description. And so on and so forth.

I layer that over my base voice in prose, and see where it gets me. Maybe I like it, maybe I don’t. I’ll keep tweaking it to fit, writing one to two thousand words in a given tone, and see how it feels. I’ll wipe that tone test and start over, picking the same or different scenes at whim, over and over, until I’ve found a tone that feels right and captures the different genres, invisibly, in the structure.

See, even if you don’t know the hallmarks of a genre in a way you can speak it and explain it, chances are if you read it you know it when you see it. So hitting the right notes can trigger that genre mix in your brain and do some of the lifting for me.

More importantly, to me, though, is that it gives the story a base tone that the characters and world building and everything else can fit in and run and play and thrive. When I feel I have it down and can drop in and out of it at will, I don’t have to worry and can just write, freeing up a big part of my brain for active, conscious creation.

Anyway! That’s just a quick look at some process junkie stuff. If you want me to dig more into that sort of thing here, let me know.