About This Training
“There are no new ideas.” If true, then there is a world of potential available to authors working in genre fiction, as they find new ways to play with these familiar toys. From time travel and aliens to zombies and werewolves to lost princes and fairy kingdoms, the tropes, motifs, and cliches of genre fiction are only waiting for the new angle and fresh take to reinvigorate them. In this workshop, we’ll cover going to the source material for inspiration, mashing up ideas, taking techniques and formatting from other media, tapping into personal experience/feelings to freshen up tropes. Exercises will include: mix-and-matching tropes/character types, genre swapping the cliches of one genre not another, and more.
About Patrick Barb
Patrick Barb is a former Elegant Lit guest judge and an author of weird, dark, and spooky stories, hailing from the southern United States and currently living (and trying not to freeze to death) with his wife two kids, and a naughty (but lovable) puppy in Saint Paul, Minnesota. As a writer, his short fiction appears in Best Horror of the Year Vol. 16, Nightscript, Diabolical Plots, and Cosmic Horror Monthly, among other publications. His longer works include the novellas Gargantuana’s Ghost (Grey Matter Press), Turn (Alien Buddha Press), JK-LOL (Mad Axe Media), Night of the Witch-Hunter (Killer VHS, Shortwave), and The Nut House (serialized in Cosmic Horror Monthly, coming soon in a collected edition from Undertaker Books and in Spanish from Dimensiones Ocultas), the novelettes Helicopter Parenting in the Age of Drone Warfare (Spooky House Press) and “So Quiet, So White” in Split Scream Vol. 3 (Tenebrous Press), and his dark fiction collections The Children’s Horror (Northern Republic Press) and Pre-Approved for Haunting (Keylight Books/Turner Publishing). He is the editor and publisher of the anthology And One Day We Will Die: Strange Stories Inspired by the Music of Neutral Milk Hotel. Barb is an Active Member and Trustee of the Horror Writers Association.
Literary Rep: Pam Gruber, High Line Literary Collective
Watch The Recording Below
This content is available to Education+ members only. Thank you for supporting Elegant Literature and new writers around the world.
