Hi there,
I've noticed that most of the writing books that are recommended around here such as Story Genius, Blueprint for a Book etc seem geared more towards lit fiction than genre fiction. While there's obviously overlap in terms of structuring and writing, it feels like many of the advice books I've read are very focused on the internal struggle of characters and generally use examples clearly geared towards writing a lit fic story.
Character arcs and internal struggles are obviously still important in genre fiction, but I feel in genre fiction the plot has a much greater role than in lit fic, and when I look to apply advice from the above books the result feels wrong for my preferred genre, fantasy.
In particular I find issues because:
- A lot of advice books focus on single protagonists, where a lot of fantasy and sci-fi has multiple POVs
- While character arcs also occur in genre, you see more examples of "flat arc characters" like Aragorn or Vimes (Or a lot of detective-esque characters). There's obviously an art to creating those characters but the lit fic advice doesn't really apply for them
- Where character arcs do occur, it's often over multiple books, so again the plot advice for lit fic is less applicable. In particular, while a character will generally have completed an arc by the end of a series, their arc is often NOT the reason a particular book ends
As such, I'm wondering if people have any recommendations for books focused more on genre style writing - I'm aware of "Fantasy Fiction Formula" but wondering if there's anything else that people would recommend. Speculative fiction is particularly preferred, but anything would be appreciated.
Cheers in advance!