Cue the Golden Retrievers

One of my guilty pleasures is reality ghost shows like THE DEAD FILES and MY HAUNTED HOUSE.  One of these shows is AMERICAN HAUNTING.  

In each episode, some poor family has the show’s cameras put all over their house to record ghostly happenings, various experts like mediums and researchers are brought in, the violence ratchets up to the point that they realize something a lot meaner than an annoyed and dead former owner is around, then an exorcist, priest, or psychic exorcist comes in and kicks out the evil thing.  

Most of these shows are filmed in the darkness and even the filming in daylight tends to be in dark tones, but after the evil whatever has been removed and the miasma of dark nastiness is lifted, the outside and inside of the house are shown in much brighter light.  

At the end of one show, the family is sent away while the psychic exorcist is at work, then they return.  As expected, the sun is bright, and the house is filled with light, but very unexpected was the presence of two golden retrievers waiting for their family to come home.

Since there had been no golden retrievers present during the filming, I was flummoxed.  Other episodes had cats wandering around and an occasional small dog as well as dogs in outside pens.  Why hadn’t they shown the golden retrievers?

I thought about it for a while and realized that it’s hard to think of evil in the presence of golden retrievers, the dog equivalent of dolphins or friendly angels, so the producers of this show had them removed from the house during the filming.  

This got me thinking about writing and how most writers fail to use images and metaphors that offer such a visceral reaction.  Even though a writer thinks about creating dark images during the unhappy times in the story, she may fail to offer light images when the unhappiness has been banished.

Sure, some images like sunlight and golden retrievers are a bit cliched, but that’s because they are honest images that convey emotion.  

Consider this the next time you are rewriting those scenes after things change for the better or worse.

 

What's Your Genre?

Within a genre or subgenre, there are different styles and types of books.  The difference can be the sensual/sex level, the romantic level, the amount of plot and characterization, scientific level, adventure levels, world building levels, etc., etc.  

These differences often mean that one reader will like certain books but not others within the same subgenre.  

In your own reading, you have probably noticed that you gravitate toward certain writers, and others leave you cold.

I have a question for you, and I want you to think really hard about it.  

Can you name several authors or book series that you want your books to be like?  I'm not talking subject matter, I'm talking the whole feel of the books.

Why are this question and its answer important?  

Novels don't exist in a vacuum.  Your novel will not only need a publisher to publish it, you'll need an audience to write to.  And despite publishers saying they want different, they want close-to-the-same different, and readers are the same way.  

You absolutely must have an answer to this question before you begin to market your book to agents/publishers/readers.

Cross-genre World Building.

Cross-genre books mix elements of two genres. The paranormal romance is really a romance with fantasy or horror worldbuilding.  The sf romance is science fiction world building in a romance, etc., etc.

I'm a firm believer that you have to understand, read, and respect the genres you are mixing, or you shouldn't write it.

In recent paranormals romances I've read, the author didn't have a clue about fantasy or that you shouldn’t steal a prominent writer’s world building because it is blatantly obvious and annoying.  One had a magic system that was a generic mishmash as well as a complete HIGHLANDER rip-off with swords, decapitations, and magic being transferred.

Another took the Harry Potter universe with its magic system and world, then tossed in her characters.

I've read futuristics that were really Klingons in love with the alien and STAR TREK names changed, or the science was so bad a third grader could have spotted the errors.

The danger of not understanding one of the genres is writers lose parts of their audience. Cross-genre is not only supposed to mix the two genre, they are supposed to mix the two audiences. Insult half that audience by not knowing your stuff, and there goes sales.

By ignoring the basics of the other genre, these writers are destroying “the dream" of the books, and that bothers me a great deal as a writer and a reader.