E.S. Raye

Almost a year ago I wrote a blog about writing outside your genre. At the time, I was waiting to hear where I had placed in the first rounds of NYC Midnight’s 2024 Short Story Challenge and Screenwriting Challenge (I made it to the second round in both contests, but crashed out in the third).

Just to refresh your memory, the NYC Midnight writing challenges assign you a genre, subject, and character (although this may vary depending on the challenge) for each round. It’s your job to incorporate these elements into a story (2500 words for the first round) that ranks in the top 5 stories in your subgroup based on several judges’ (three?) rating.

Then you get to do it again with a new assignment and a shorter wordcount, so on and so forth.

This year, what I have dreaded from the start has finally happened:

I’ve been saddled with romance in the first round.

Romance is not my strong suit, and it’s what got me knocked out in round 2 last year. I’m unfamiliar with the tropes, the clichés, even the structure. Furthermore, with only 8 days total (5 left as I write this), I don’t have time to learn them.

So this time, I’m trying something different.

Rather than try to conjure up something from nothing, I’ve decided to focus on a single trope and put my own twist on the structure of an existing property.

To be clear, I am not taking someone else’s work and passing it off as mine. Rather, I’m examining the structure of an existing work and putting my own story over top of it.

The story in question is Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. I’ve never actually read this book, so I think the chances of me plagiarizing anything are exactly zero. But I can use the basic plot structure to inform me of where my conflicts should be and what readers expect from a romance story.

I am also, of course, twisting it into sci-fi. Because it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t.

Hopefully this will be enough to carry me through to the 2nd round. And then hopefully the powers that be will reward me and grant me the one genre I have been pining for but have never received in all the rounds of all the NYC Midnight writing challenges I have participated in: true, hard science fiction!

I’m cutting this one short today so I can get back to working on that story–there are still a number of details I need worked out to not get disqualified before I start writing and time is running out!

Wish me luck!