You’ve seen it done… “Zombie Apocalypse in Space.” “Perry Mason in the Armed Forces.”  It’s genre blending, where the author takes themes prevalent in two different genres and combines them to create something new.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. We call down a few examples of both, and offer you listeners the sage advice you need to blend genres successfully. Summary: like the vegan barbecue chef, one of the secrets to your success lies in letting no-one know what that hamburger is made of. No, that metaphor is not in the podcast. I just thought of it now.

We finish with a discussion of the genres we’ve blended in our own work, and Brandon tells us about the science fiction story he’s decided to work on.

This episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery. Pre-orders close this Wednesday!

Writing Prompt: Combine “Horror” and “Western” and don’t make it look like either one.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Mixing genres can alienate readers. So don’t tell them. Borrow and hide it. Well stolen is half composed. Even the writer doesn’t always know what he will grow when he blends genres. Beware the Western Stigma!

[Brandon] Genre blending. Once again I have to explain my weird title for the podcast. We have talked about mixing genres before. We have talked about doing cool things with genres. We have done specific genre podcasts…
[Dan] I think we called that genre busting in the past.
[Howard] When you take your genre and then do something with it that is outside. We talked about how that works better in YA.

[Brandon] One thing I’ve noticed recently. A friend was talking about the Star Trek movie First Contact which is my personal favorite Star Trek movie. He mentioned to me “that movie is just a zombie apocalypse movie with the Star Trek characters.” If you’re not familiar with this movie, there is this alien race — The Borg — that are slowly taking over the ship, one person at a time, dragging them off and turning them into one of them. It’s very dark. The Borg don’t use guns, they’re marching toward the people zombielike… it really is a zombie apocalypse movie. I realized what Star Trek was doing for that was it was drawing tropes from a different genre and hiding them within its own genre.
[Howard] Isn’t there a playground game that works the same way? One person starts out as it and as you tag people, they are also it until eventually it’s 30 people on one?
[Brandon] Thanks for ruining my childhood, there.
[Howard] That’s a zombie apocalypse playground game.
[Dan] That’s not a playground game, that’s mostly just people picking on Howard. The 30 people that were chasing you, they weren’t playing a game. Sorry.
[Howard] They told me it was all in fun.

[Brandon] And then they ate your brain. The other thing that I noticed that made me want to do a podcast on this, was noticing that I’ve seen several times where people have failed spectacularly, doing awesome things with genre bending.
[Howard] Are we going to mention those poor people by name?
[Brandon] I will mention one of them, he’s a friend of mine. His name is John Hemry. Because you should go out and find his books, because they’re pretty good ideas. The idea was J.A.G. in space. Lawyer books mixed with military science fiction.
[Howard] J.A.G. — that’s the Judge Advocate General.
[Brandon] Judge Advocate General — which is a military lawyer. So he was doing lawyery things, defending people and stuff…
[Howard] In space.
[Brandon] In the middle of space and these great SF settings and things. He said… he now publishes very popularly under a pseudonym because these books had some troubles. You should read those books too, by the way. Jack Campbell. Anyway. He said, “I think the problem was that the people who like lawyer books picked these up and said oh, lawyer book meets science fiction. I don’t read science fiction, I’m not going to read these. The science fiction people picked them up and said oh, I don’t read lawyer stuff and didn’t read them.” That’s your danger with mixing genres.
[Howard] So the problem was that he called attention to it or that he blended two things that up until now nobody realized were mutually exclusive?
[Brandon] I thought it was a great idea when you say it to me. Yet, I can see why audiences didn’t pick it up. So let’s talk about this. Why do… this isn’t the only one. I’ve seen people have trouble…

[Howard] Let me give you an anecdote that’s from a completely different medium. When StarCraft One was being beta tested at E3 — it had to be an early beta, it might even have been an alpha. One of the kids who was watching the game looked up and watched the game and said, “Oh, cool, Orcs in space.” One of the game leads was standing right over his shoulder and heard him say that. He went back to his team and said, “We have to start again. Because this is not supposed to be WarCraft in space, this is supposed to be something new.” They went back and they retooled the game so it wasn’t Orcs in Space. What they came up with was a lot more interesting.

[Brandon] The question is how do you avoid those problems? How do you genre blend without alienating both audiences?
[Howard] Don’t let one of the audiences know they’re invited?
[Brandon] I would say, that’s…
[Dan] That’s actually, as snarky as it sound, really good advice.
[Howard] Yeah. For the lawyers in space? You’re not going to get lawyers to read sci-fi. So you bill it as sci-fi… and…
[Brandon] And you borrow without telling anyone.
[Howard] And you borrow without telling anyone.
[Brandon] We do this all the time as writers. We do it a ton. I think you hit it right on the head. If those had been billed just as military science fiction books, people pick them up, read them, aren’t really getting the lawyery vibes, they’re just enjoying all the things that lawyer stories do without actually realizing they’re reading a lawyer story.

[Howard] I’m going to do the unthinkable. I’m going to use, as a negative example, Firefly.
[Brandon] Wow.
[Howard] Because Firefly was blending westerns and space. I think Firefly got canceled because that opening… that intro… which we are all in love with now… that intro looked like corny cowboy stuff with a dumb song that was written by Joss Whedon and I just didn’t like it.
[Brandon] Oh, burn.
[Howard] Burn. I just didn’t like…
[Brandon] Disclosure — Howard and Joss are up for the same award at WorldCon.
[Howard] Yes, yes. I’m dissing the competition. But… I listened to the song, I looked at the credits, and I thought, “This looks like dumb cowboy stuff. I don’t want to watch cowboy stuff. I thought this was sci-fi about mercenaries.” Now, I turned out to be wrong, and I loved Firefly and I loved Serenity. But I think that one of the reasons they got canceled…
[Brandon] One of the reasons they struggled with the average audience…
[Howard] They struggled with the average audience is because many of them couldn’t clear that first hurdle.
[Brandon] Many of our listeners may say, “Well, forget the average audience. I want to write what I want to write.” I say, “Okay! Go for it.” [Garbled] At the same time, if you’ve got a chance to reach your audience and get to them all the things you want to get to them without letting them know what you’re doing, that might be a better situation to be in.

[Dan] So here’s a counter example in which this has been done really effectively, which is the Alien series. First one, Alien, that is science fiction that is actually horror.
[Brandon] Horror.
[Howard] It’s a horror movie. In space.
[Dan] Number two, science fiction, but it’s actually an action movie. It’s actually military sci-fi, well, yeah, military action thing. The third one is back to this horror thriller thing. Each one is a subtly different genre, all within the umbrella of science fiction.
[Howard] Alien did not take the advice that we’ve offered. Because the tagline for Alien was “In space” — oops, science fiction — “no one can hear you scream” — oh, gosh, it’s going to be scary. They invited both groups to the party.
[Dan] They were successful because they were able to do it very, very well.
[Howard] And they were successful because those two groups are accustomed to bending the laws of reality in the same sorts of ways.
[Brandon] Beyond that, those two groups have been associated… had been associated before.
[Howard] That’s true. Horror and sci-fi are both genre fiction.
[Brandon] In the early days, there was no distinction. Lovecraft was horror, sci-fi, fantasy. No one cared which one you were really writing. They would all get shelved together. At the same time, I’m looking at saying… we can look at Mistborn.
[Howard] That was the example that I would have picked up next.

[Brandon] I wanted people who are reading epic fantasy to read my books. These are the people who are going to love my books and are going to enjoy them. Between those pages, I am borrowing from the heist genre and I am borrowing from hard science fiction in creating my magic system. But when you pick up that book and look at it, what I want you to say is, “Wow. I love epic fantasy. I’m going to read this.” What I’m trying to do is create epic fantasy that takes some cool things from other genres and adapts them to epic fantasy. That’s one of the big things I had to do in revising Mistborn was not make it a heist novel. I had to make sure it was an epic fantasy that used some of the cool things.
[Howard] If you had marketed the novel… or rather if Tor had marketed Mistborn as hard science fiction in a fantasy setting, the fantasy people would’ve said I don’t like science fiction and the hard science fiction people would’ve said…
[Brandon] This isn’t nearly hard enough.
[Howard] You can’t do hard science fiction in a fantasy setting. It wouldn’t have sold.
[Brandon] It comes back to what I’m trying to do most. Most, I’m trying to give the sense of epicness that goes in epic fantasy. It’s in the definition there. That’s what I want my readers to get. Epic scope. World is in danger. Lots of different characters that you’re getting invested in following them through all of this world ending stuff. We’re breaking. For a commercial.

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[Howard and Brandon chorus] And now, we’re back.
[Brandon] That was the lamest break ever, Brandon.
[Dan] And yet such a fantastic product.
[Howard] You’d think we would have learned something after talking about dramatic breaks last week, but no, we don’t listen to ourselves.
[Dan] No one else does.

[Brandon] What have you guys borrowed from and how has it worked for you?
[Howard] Wow. I borrow… I take John Cage’s advice — well stolen is half composed. I borrow freely from horror, I borrow freely from political novels, political thrillers… if I see something I like, I use it.
[Brandon] I’m going to be full disclosure here. This is going to sound hokey, but I think it’s going to be cool. I’m working on a science fiction book right now where I am borrowing from the sports movie genre.
[Howard] Perfect.
[Brandon] Yes. I’m going to have spaceship combat that plays like football.
[Dan] So in the last chapter, does the admiral’s father come into the back of the auditorium…
[Brandon] Oh, that would be awesome.
[Dan] and watch as he makes the winning play?
[Howard] And the little boy on the bridge flaps his arms?
[Brandon] I should never have mentioned this to you guys. I’m taking the sports movie motif… it’s got a lot of interesting motifs. It’s got a lot of interesting drama. I am going to apply that to a subplot in a science fiction book with a squad of spaceship combat troops… or small ship combat…
[Howard] You can play from some of the finest films out there, like Over The Top.
[Dan] I expect a slow clap as well.
[Brandon] But we’ve got a spaceship combat built around delivering a bomb to the enemy capital ship and then getting away. So you’re running a touchdown. It’s just you end up massacring 500 people at the end of it. What have you borrowed from, Dan? Top that.

[Dan] I don’t know if I can. I tend to borrow more from the news than I do from other works of fiction. But it’s still something that I overtly steal. I will look out and I will think here’s… tropes of this… I want to do this kind of serial killer this time.
[Brandon] I think that’s a whole can of worms though. Borrowing from the news and from history and adapting into your work. We could do a whole podcast on that.
[Howard] That’s research. That’s a flavor of research. You didn’t answer the question, Dan. We stumped you.
[Dan] In terms of genres of fiction, Serial Killer frankly is half horror novel and half teen problem novel.
[Brandon] Oh, yes. The teen problem novel.
[Dan] It is about a 15-year-old boy who nobody loves and he has problems in his life and blah blah blah.
[Howard] Now let’s look at the marketing. How is it being marketed? In Germany, they’re marketing it as a horror novel, aren’t they?
[Brandon] They’re staying away from the teen problem aspect.
[Dan] In fact, I found out recently that Tor is as well. When the US comes out, the US release will be adult thriller.
[Brandon] Which is probably smart. The teen problem stuff… it makes for an interesting plot, it makes for an interesting character dynamic, but you’re not…
[Howard] You don’t want your teenager to identify with a serial killer.
[Brandon] The teen problem readers are not going to want to read this book. The horror readers are going to want to read it, and they’re going to gain a depth of characterization.
[Howard] That’s a perfect use of genre blending.
[Dan] It’s not the kind of thing you could stick into… you couldn’t stick it on the same shelf as a teen problem novel, because it is not. That’s why it is being successfully marketed as something else in so many markets. However, like you say, it uses that to enhance what’s already there.

[Howard] That comes back to what Brandon said originally, which is… maybe you didn’t say it in the podcast, maybe we talked about it earlier. Which is that one of the points of genre blending is to take the genre within which you want to tell your story and borrow famous…
[Brandon] Cool stuff.
[Howard] Plot lines… full plot/character/arc structures from those other genres and put them in your setting where they’re not going to be recognized as having been stolen.
[Brandon] Let’s look at the epic fantasy genre as a whole. It is borrowing heavily from the historical novel which had a grand long tradition before epic fantasy really took off. Epic fantasy really is historical plus speculative. That’s where it came from.
[Dan] It’s historical for history that isn’t real.
[Brandon] That’s how Tolkien even billed what he was doing.

[Dan] Let me ask you a question. When you were talking about how when you’re trying to combine epic fantasy with heist movie, you backed off the heist movie very deliberately…
[Brandon] I did.
[Dan] Then we have the Locke Lamora books which are much more overtly heist movie, thief movie, and yet still fantasy — more heroic than epic. Why do you think it works in that case when he didn’t back off on the heist aspect?
[Brandon] I think that heroic and heist were working better together than epic and heist. What I have to do for epic is I have to seed for multiple books, and I have to have character arcs that go across multiple books, and I have to deal with the deep issues of multiple characters, and I have to deal with the world being put in danger in a lot of ways. That’s not necessarily the only aspect of epic, but you’ve got to have that scope. By definition, a heist story is more of a thriller story. You are not looking for scope, you’re looking for a short period of time with bursts of energy.
[Dan] It begins, it ends, they’re done.
[Howard] A heist story is also a mystery story after a fashion. It’s not whodunit, it’s how are they going to do it, because often it is being done before you are being told how it is being done.
[Brandon] I did write the first draft focusing a lot on the heist and it didn’t work for those reasons. Locke Lamora… he can focus on the heist because he’s telling much more of a thriller type, fast-paced story.

[Howard] I think this raises an important point that we just need to call out. That is that if your starting point is “I’m going to work within this genre and I’m going to borrow a plot line from another genre,” and your ending point is “you know what, I ended up with a good book that was nothing like I thought it would be like”. Congratulations, you win. Just because it doesn’t feel like Western in Space anymore doesn’t mean you failed. It means you took the right seeds and grew something completely new.

[Brandon] I’m going to end with one caveat on all of this — that I still see a lot of editors cringe whenever you pitch any sort of Western anything to them.
[Howard] The pitch.
[Brandon] If you’re going to borrow Western elements…
[Dan] Make sure to hide it.
[Brandon] Hide it real well. We do it all the time, because the Western has some great tropes, particularly for science fiction. But the Western now is a genre which has a stigma attached to it. If you borrow Western, don’t go to the editor and say, “it’s a fantasy Western.” Go to say, “It’s an awesome epic fantasy and let me tell you about what’s awesome about it.”
[Howard] It’s an epic fantasy set on the frontiers.
[Dan] When I was at the Stoker awards last month, they had a panel about The Horror Stigma because horror itself has that same kind of thing. Somebody on the panel joked that the only way to make horror less appealing to an editor is to combine it with a Western.

[Brandon] We have our writing prompt. Combine horror and Western, and don’t make it look like either one. This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.