Two Genres

A lot of people say things like "there are no new ideas". It's something I don't agree with myself as clearly these people haven't seen Avatar: The Last Airbender, read The Dark Tower, used an iPod scroll wheel or, for that matter, been on the web at all. Still, assuming they're right then I guess the only thing to do is mix the ideas we have differently. Forget chocolate covered strawberries. Let's try chocolate covered fish.

In writing, you can craft some interesting and novel stories by blending two genres. One genre becomes your setting and the other your plot. Why not have a World War 2 style war movie set in the future? Or a detective mystery set in medieval times? Some of the most popular fiction around uses a two genre approach like this.

Terry Pratchett is one author who uses this to great effect. His popular Discworld books are technically fantasy but if you look closely, you'll find it's only in the setting. The plots of his books vary from detective noir (starring the Ankh-Morpork City Watch), science fiction (mostly involving time travel but also once space flight), political drama (mostly starring the City Watch again), a war novel ("Monstrous Regiment"), corporate crime drama ("Going Postal"), Hammer Horror ("Carpe Jugulum"), opera ("Maskerade") and even, very occasionally, traditional fantasy.

In each case, the setting is fantasy but the setting is also entirely in the background, treated the same distant, just-a-backdrop way that a city might be in a Hollywood movie. The plot itself is of an entirely different genre and the mix of the two make Terry Pratchett's books startlingly original in the ranks of fantasy books - because, really, they're not fantasy at all.

Some remixes are cliché, though. Horror as a plot gets blended with different settings regularly, as do thrillers and romance. The best mixes are those which are out of left field: A supernatural horror cop show (The X-Files), a science fiction western (Firefly and its sequel movie Serenity), fantasy on a future Earth colony world (the Pern books) or, yes, a gunslinger in a sword and sorcery fantasy series (The Dark Tower).

So, if you want to do something interesting with a story, try throw two darts at a big sheet of paper covered in genres - one dart labelled "plot" and one "setting". The result will probably sound daft on first blush but I bet "World War 2 movie in space" did before Star Wars came out, too.