Jun 27 & Jul 5, 2022
Generating Gorgeous Genre
Both in the Apex Strategy session and at the Apex SFF Group, I was honored to present an hour-long workshop on Generating Gorgeous Genre.
Each Monday night, the Apex Writers Group, founded by NYT bestselling author David Farland (http://mystorydoctor.com/), has a one-hour Zoom workshop on various topics about writing, publishing, andmarketing.
I presented a PowerPoint presentation on genre tropes, tricks, and traps. It was a condensed version of the month-long workshop I usually present on SavvyAuthors and the day-longworkshop I’ve presented live at the Tarrant County College and at The Bookstore, in The Hague and inAmsterdam, The Netherlands.
Then, the Apex SFF Group asked me to fill in a slot on July 5th, so I popped in and adjusted some of the statisticstowards science fiction and fantasy.
Fantasy is doing better since covid, as well as audiobooks. Of course,nothing is doing as well as Romance in the fiction section. Someday, right?
Knowing our genre inside and out is essential to writing well in our genre and grabbing out readers attentionand keeping them reading page by page. Genre tropes and appeal elements help us develop every level of ourstory and resonate throughout. In the workshop, I spoke about making our words work, about making them word hard, doing double and triple duty.
We talked about cliches and how to trick em up into our own personalgenre trope. We looked at how other authors used words and phrases as their own genre tropes to set up theirworld and characters on page one and then we looked at our own page ones and counted our genre tropes.How many genre tropes do your page ones have?
I had fun with it and I think I did pretty good. I was very nervous, but I got a few pats on the back so I livedthrough it :). I learned what to do now, after presenting it live in an hour, to make it better, and hope to be ableto present it again somewhere else.
If you are unfamiliar with the Apex Writers Group, check it out. It’s a wonderful grouponline (online/Zoom/Discord/Facebook) with tons of information on writing. There are established writers andwriters just getting into writing. I love it.
