What genre would our world be if it was fictional?
Action-Adventure? Horror? Romance? Comedy? Science fiction? Fantasy? Mystery? Thriller? Dystopia? Erotica? Young adult?
Our world is all these things… but a genre is not elements within the fiction. It is what defines the fiction. What genre defines our real world in its entirety?
DRAMA.
Everything in our world is with “drama” in mind. The actions, adventures, horrors, love, silliness, science, dreams, mysteries, thrills, politics, sexuality and adolescence are written to tell a story about people interacting with each other as individuals.
I write fiction. My style emphasizes dialog over exposition. The struggles of good against evil are personal rather than social. The big picture is merely a setting for what happens in the lives of individual characters.
The genre of my fiction is usually action-adventure. It is sometimes horror, usually as survival horror. My thematic specialty is sexy girls as the droves of expendable baddies.
DRAMA.
Sexy, scary or adventurous are thrilling… but cheap
thrills unless dramatic. I am mindful of this. The stories I write must
be about the characters. Everything else, even the stories themselves, must
be secondary.
I try not to cheat the drama. When an opportunity arises to build up the relationship between characters, it is best to take it. Stories are about the people in them, so their concerns come first.
ReplyDeleteI read your novel LITTLE MONSTERS, about orcs and goblins as children. The story was about their families. It made these otherwise "disposable" characters into wonderfully endearing people I loved. They never became human, but they were people, and they acted accordingly.
DeleteI like looking at the world like a story, but people in the story tend to find it hard to read it.
ReplyDeleteThe "NPCs" in reality are "supporting characters" in the fiction that is life. The "main characters" are the very few people God finds interesting.
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