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Re: Help with Detective/Horror combo genre please!
An update....
I just finished wading through Truby's genre class. First the cons...he does a lot of - sound / no visual - excerpting from movies of key scenes...and while he provides a PDF explanation of what's going on -- this was on the whole not very effective.
Where he does go right is in categorizing the Detective, Crime and Thriller stories into genres that rely on specific beats. While I found my story overlapping in several instances -- it was highly useful to use these as check-marks. This is great in helping the writer KNOW what genre they are truly in which greatly helps in focusing the story.
The second way is how Truby emphasizes to set up a crime that is at war with the Detective's sense of self. This sets up the dual conflict of that with the antagonist and of course with one's own beliefs.
The third area where he does so well is where he outlines the means to transcend the Detective, Crime, Thriller story. I NEVER was of the mind of what methods one could use to elevate a well worn format. Then he gave the example of a simple murder investigation in "Chinatown" played against the much larger societal thematic of water rights in California. This in turn helped me move my gimmicky crime of horror into a much bigger contemporary mosaic. It heightened the tradgedy that the protagonist confronts in the end when he has indeed convicted the killer but lost the war waged against his own mores by a socially networked society, far beyond his old school ways. And therein I got my "sticks with you ending."
An update....
I just finished wading through Truby's genre class. First the cons...he does a lot of - sound / no visual - excerpting from movies of key scenes...and while he provides a PDF explanation of what's going on -- this was on the whole not very effective.
Where he does go right is in categorizing the Detective, Crime and Thriller stories into genres that rely on specific beats. While I found my story overlapping in several instances -- it was highly useful to use these as check-marks. This is great in helping the writer KNOW what genre they are truly in which greatly helps in focusing the story.
The second way is how Truby emphasizes to set up a crime that is at war with the Detective's sense of self. This sets up the dual conflict of that with the antagonist and of course with one's own beliefs.
The third area where he does so well is where he outlines the means to transcend the Detective, Crime, Thriller story. I NEVER was of the mind of what methods one could use to elevate a well worn format. Then he gave the example of a simple murder investigation in "Chinatown" played against the much larger societal thematic of water rights in California. This in turn helped me move my gimmicky crime of horror into a much bigger contemporary mosaic. It heightened the tradgedy that the protagonist confronts in the end when he has indeed convicted the killer but lost the war waged against his own mores by a socially networked society, far beyond his old school ways. And therein I got my "sticks with you ending."
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