 Drama: February 05, 2014 Issue [#6123] |
  Drama
This week: Genres and Pitfalls Edited by: Joy  
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“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
Ernest Hemingway
“I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.”
Andre Dubus III
“Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.”
Alberto Manguel, Dark Arrows: Great Stories of Revenge
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about avoiding the pitfalls some of the most popular genres may present.
Your Drama Newsletter Editors: zwisis NickiD89  kittiara Joy
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
Note: In the editorial, I refer to third person singular as he, to also mean the female gender, because I don't like to use they or he/she.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Genre fiction requires specific settings, roles, events, and values that define its individual divisions. In other words, each individual genre has its own formula. In our time, since the borders between literary fiction and genre fiction have begun to blur, genre fiction need not be of poor quality or clichéd, as it was considered to be, a few decades ago.
Good solid writing, believable character development, and strategic plot construction applies to all fiction, with or without a set genre. Especially the characters are the most important components of any kind of fiction.
Keeping the above factors in mind, when we look into a genre, we find uniqueness and precision in any one area or another. Sometimes, this uniqueness and precision can become a booby trap for the writer, causing flaws inside his story.
This newsletter, therefore, will look into the likely pitfalls in the few basic, most popular genres, such as: Romance/Love, Horror, Mystery, Science Fiction, Action/Adventure, and Fantasy genres. In addition, because comedy and drama can be found in any fiction, we will touch upon Comedy and Drama, too, and start with their pitfalls.
Drama is the exploration of character interaction in human experience. It can be intrinsic, which means depending on what comes from the essence or the inside, or extrinsic, which means depending on outside influences.
The pitfalls when writing drama or a dramatic scene or story can be:
1. Omitting a good cliffhanger
2. Omitting to create tension through meaningful dialogue
3. Not giving each character a distinctive voice, mannerisms, separate internal traits, a personal vocabulary, or local jargon
4. Failing to create deep relationships, positive or negative, between characters, for example: strong heartbreaks and emotional triumphs, a parent and child as rivals, lovers who are not yet aware that they are in love, etc.
Comedy is a device that brings humor and amuses the readers by causing them to laugh or to grin and sneer.
The pitfalls for comedy can be:
1. Writing to a joke instead of letting the joke come out of a character or situation. Such as slipping on banana peel joke versus the French president, in the corridors of the UN building, slipping and falling on the floor while providing a slick answer to a serious question by a reporter.
2. Being mean, hurtful, sarcastic, or prejudicial against a group or a private person
The Romance/Love Genre
This genre deals with a central love story, which usually has an optimistic or emotionally satisfying ending.
Romance/Love Genre Pitfalls:
1. Using too many adverbs to show emotion instead of defining the action or emotion with concrete nouns and verbs.
2. Making the hero and heroine drop-down gorgeous instead of portraying real people
3. Using clichés when referring to or describing body parts
4. Lack of research as to the location and time period
5. Using cliché situations like pregnancy winning the hero.
6. Point of View Problems: This is the part where writers fail the most for they may resort to having multiple third person viewpoints. It is better to limit the POV to the heroine and/or the hero or only to one third person, as in The Great Gatsby.
The Horror Genre:
Horror is born from human needs and themes, and is closely related to drama in that drama exploits human needs, whereas horror restricts them.
Pitfalls of the horror genre:
1. Not building the tension slowly
2. Overabundance of violence
3. Not pulling back when the story is flooded with horror scenes such as gore or cruelty edging on porn. This would desensitize the reader. Instead, implied or feared horror may produce a stronger effect.
4. Omitting the feeling and concentrating on the event. By feeling I mean fears, anxieties, and exploration of the human psyche.
The Mystery Genre:
This genre, in general, deals with detective, crime, or thriller fiction. It may be supernatural or not, and it involves a puzzle or a suspense element.
1. Filling the story with unnecessary details and actions, as almost always everything that happens should have a relevance to the mystery at hand, even the red herring.
2. Not writing believable dialogue and not making people speak like real people
3. Side-tracking and getting lost, and thus clouding the real mystery to be solved
4. Not planning the buildup of suspense, which has to do with pacing
5. Not wrapping up the ending properly
The Sci-Fi Genre:
Science Fiction deals with subjects related to science, technology, space and the future, as well as characteristic plots or settings, and may involve politics, philosophy, and human nature.
The Sci-Fi Genre Pitfalls:
1. Not knowing enough science and general knowledge or avoiding proper research
2. Bending scientific rules without understanding them thoroughly and making up facts and pulling stuff out of nowhere
3. Overdoing the scientific data and making the story sound like a textbook
The Action/Adventure Genre:
This genre focuses on exciting action sequences and undertakings that involve risk and physical danger.
Action/Adventure Pitfalls:
1. Using long passages of narrative, therefore dulling the excitement
2. Omitting to put the characters in danger
3. Omitting to show the character emotions in fight scenes and in regard to the conflict
4. Not visualizing the actions of the characters correctly, For example: if the character has the sword in his right hand, he can’t push away another person with his right hand also. He has to use his left hand.
The Fantasy Genre:
As its main plot element, theme, or setting, the Fantasy Genre uses magic and other supernatural phenomena and its stories usually take place in imaginary worlds with magical creatures.
Fantasy Pitfalls:
1. Placing too much emphasis on world creation. The landscape may be intriguing but only to a degree; yet, it is the characters and their races, wars, and conflicts that will keep the readers reading.
2. Cliché actions, especially when the universal themes are forced with a lack of imagination
3. Not knowing enough of or not having developed the kinds of arms and other objects used by the characters.
If you wish to look further into genres and their branches here are a couple of links:
http://www.cuebon.com/ewriters/genres.html
http://www.agentquery.com/genre_descriptions.aspx
 Wishing you a very happy Valentine's Day...
Until next time… |
 Enjoy!
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