literary techniques for genre fiction

When I sat down to work out the outline for my Moving from Idea to Finished Draft, I came up with almost two dozen possible starting points for writing a story, including scene, title, taking an old plot, a character, dialog, a particular device, and more. As I finished writing it, those categories shifted around a little, sometimes sliding together, other times diverging, but I did think I’d managed to exhaust the possibilities…

…only to be proven wrong, of course. A week or so ago at the Surrey International Writers Conference I was absolutely delighted when an audience member hit me with a new one that I hadn’t considered at all.

When I teach the class, which focuses on how to take an idea and use it to finish a story, I talk a little bit about story structure and writing process, but most of the class relies on asking participants what the idea is that they’re working with. This time, a woman said, “My idea is a twinned story” and explained that she wanted to write two stories in parallel.

You might argue that it’s a particular manifestation of a frame story, which is something covered in the Devices section of the class, but she wanted it to be more than that: her story was about a couple discovering letters in their attic that tell the story of another couple’s marriage. So let’s look at this according to the structure I use in Moving from Idea to Finished Draft, looking at what it is, what it gives you, what considerations you should take into account while writing, possible pitfalls, next steps, and a few exercises designed to increase understanding of the idea.

We are preparing to move and in some ways are inadequately prepared, while in others we are more than ahead. I hadn’t unpacked a good couple of dozen boxes from the study, so those can pretty much just go straight back out (this time we’re hiring movers rather than doing it ourselves).

It’s weird prepping to move again, to hope that this time we’ll manage to achieve escape velocity. We’ve got a renter for this place, and a year’s lease on the new one, so we’ll see. Today I’ll go through cupboards, try to sort out some stuff to pitch rather than take with us, take advantage of the opportunity to declutter and cull some old and faded spices, discard dingy rags, ditch old magazines, etc.

I have tried not to overburden us in preparation, to jettison instead, but there will be some things we’ll need to pick up once there: an ironing board and iron, a table for the sewing machine, a second bath mat, more towels, etc. Instead I’ve been mostly picking up bits for a Halloween costume this year; trying to do something worthy of a SFWA president. I did also breakdown and buy the sourdough its own crock, but that was because Value Village was having 50 percent off day.

I finished one collaboration last week and am picking away at finishing up a bespoke story right now, then more on the novel, because I am so ready for that to be done. I’m also working on the updated Creating an Online Presence for Writers as well as adapting the Character Building and Editing 101 classes for the Fedora platform to go with the shiny new on-demand version of Literary techniques for Genre Writers.

Here’s another video, this time for the Literary Techniques for Speculative Fiction Online Class. This is my favorite so far.

Discussion and in-class writing exercises designed to introduce a number of techniques to use in your own writing such as foreshadowing, alliteration, rhythmic device, allusion, etc, and ways to test them out in short fiction as well as discussion of when and where to use them.