This is a transcript of the Stories We Don’t Tell Podcast, Episode 91: Genre.
Here we are for the latest instalment of the Five in Five Series: After Dark. These are five little short episodes of some writing tips and challenges to help you get your groove back.
I lost my groove a little bit over the summer. We're trying to get her groove back by issuing a challenge to ourselves and others. Hopefully we’ll help make it a little bit easier to write or to at least get the first 20 or 30 words on a page. That's the real key - start the writing and then it sort of flows from there.
Click on the image to listen to episode 91.
Our topic this week is genre. Genre is a french word for genre. Fun fact. Generally speaking, personal storytelling doesn’t usually have a specific genre. It's usually short enough that you're just really trying to relay your experiences as authentically as you can and aren't really focused too much on trying to turn the story into a certain type of story.
With our challenge today, we’re interested in giving yourself a bit of a break from personal storytelling and maybe get into a specific genre. It could help open things up a little bit for you, and choosing a different genre could change your focus.
The idea is to take a genre and lean into the cliches of that particular style so that people can recognize what you're doing. It’s fun to try and find a genre or style you know and kind of play with it.
Often I get stuck in telling stories from my own lived reality, which is fun. But it’s an interesting challenge to pick something and get out of your head a little bit.
I'm issuing this challenge to myself as well. There's a certain story I want to tell that is in a fantasy epic style. The challenge for everyone else is to tell a story in a different genre. Choose a specific genre you’d like to work in - could be a fantasy or Science Fiction or a Shakespearean Sonnet - and superimpose a personal story using this style. It’s a great way to start. This is a challenge to get you to step out of your comfort zone a little bit and get you writing.
All right we did it again. Nailed it.