Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/01/17/11-03-layering-the-elemental-genres/

Key points: Borrow elemental genres (ideas, emotions) from other stories and inject them into your stories as subplots, character arcs, or mashups. Layer your elemental genres to create sequels that are the same, but different. Let each character's arc be a different elemental genre. You can use design elements, set dressing, to keep the story together, and mix-and-match elemental genres underneath that to tell different stories. Check your underpinnings -- what is the feeling you like? Drill down into the elemental genre behind the design elements. Turn your wall into a trench, or darkness, or... with a great unknown hidden behind it.

( Is there icing in between the layers? )

[Brandon] We're going to leave you with some homework. Mary's got the homework for us, and it relates to the homework we gave you last time.
[Mary] All right. So last time we asked you to identify the major driving emotion of the story that you are interested in working on. What I want you to do now is I want you to think of a contrasting emotion. So essentially what you're doing is you're creating a foil plot, a foil emotion for your primary emotion. Because this is going to allow you to showcase ever... Or do a contrast between the darkness of one and the happy emotions of the other. So think about not the design elements, but think about the emotional elements and think about... You don't have to worry about our proprietary vocabulary yet. I just want you to identify the emotion that you want to elicit in yourself if you were hacking your brain.
[Brandon] Now by this point, we will have all 11 of the ideas we've come up with put on our website and we will post them such... We will put them in a place that they are easy to find each week, if you want to come glance over them again. As you can tell from this episode, we're still getting used to this terminology ourselves.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Hopefully, across the course of the year, we'll all start really using the same terminology. This is the purpose...
[Howard] I'm going to put a stake in the ground and say that by the end of the season, we will have altered some of the terminology and changed the list, because it just makes more sense.
[Mary] Yep. You guys will probably be better versed in it that we will, because we just talked about it once.
[Brandon] All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.