Genre Mashups: The fantastical past

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. Have you been enjoying our month of writing prompts? I’ve gotten a lot of really unique ideas out of it—some of which I really do think I’ll be using in some upcoming stories.

As you know, if you’ve been around for the month of October, we’re talking genre mashups—and discussing some writing prompts for mashing those genres together. Why are we talking about this? Well, because we could all stand to get outside our comfort zones, as writers, and because with NaNoWriMo coming up, now’s the time to really get those ideas hammered out, so next month we can power our way through writing a whole book.

Today? I have a fun one for you.

Genre Mashups: The fantastical past

It might seem basic, sure, but like we’ve said all month long, there’s nothing new under the sun. Every single genre pairing has already been done, by someone. To be frank, I’m fairly certain that every story has already been told—but I know for sure that it hasn’t been written by every one of us, and that just like writers are different, readers are different. The same story written by different authors will appeal to different readers, across the spectrum. So don’t let the “but I’ve read this story before” notion put you off from writing the story you want to write. It hasn’t been written by you, so the world doesn’t have that story yet. No excuses. Write it.

But let’s start by defining our genres, shall we?

Historical fiction is, well, just that. It’s fiction that takes place in the past. There are a couple primary ways we generally go about doing this, but essentially, it’s just fiction that’s not set in present day or future. It’s often either centered around a specific place in the past, a specific (often famous) person, or a specific event from history. It’s really more of a category, than a genre. It’s pretty easy to mix other genres in with historical, since historical really just means that as a category, books in this genre take place in the past.

Fantasy, in all actuality, isn’t all that different from historical, as a genre. It’s also more of a category than a specific theme, meaning that it also blends well with others. Fantasy is generally defined by the existence of nonhuman beings, like dwarves, elves, gnomes, dragons, and any manner of author-created beings, often (but not always) alongside the use of magic. Because it’s really more of a category, a genre that’s defined only by a few specific things that exist within the genre, it mixes extremely well with others.

And that’s why I wanted to talk about these two!

To be fair, fantasy, as a genre, often takes place in the past. It doesn’t always, but it’s been primarily associated with medieval times, up through the Victorian era. I’m honestly not entirely sure why that’s the case, but it is.

Because of that, I want to play around with these two genres a bit, for our writing prompt. I think, in some ways, these two can be a bit easy to play with, a bit too easy to really consider a fun mashup… so let’s do something very typical of historical fiction, and put a fantasy spin on it.

Pick one of your favorite events from history. Something big. Something most people would recognize. Now, change it. Change it so that the world is a fantasy one, where all the beings of your imagination exist. Write that event now, but write it with all those beings involved. Write it, thinking about what might’ve changed or been completely different, by the existence of these other beings in the world.

Me? I think I’d write about Henry VIII… and maybe he’s struggling to have kids because his wife is an elf, and halfbreeds don’t exist… I’m not sure, but I think it’s something to play around with.

What did you come up with? If you’ve written anything fun off any of the prompts this month, I’d love to read them!

[love]

{Rani Divine}