Back when the kindle was young, and reading off of portable computers was the new hot trend, Stephen King wrote a short story titled Ur. This short story was about a college professor who, out of spite at his ex, finally broke down and ordered a kindle of his own. However, while all kindles at the time were white, this one was pink. Not only that, but when he bought books to add to it, they were never actually charged to his card.
Without giving too many spoilers, he soon realizes there is something unique about this kindle... namely that it can access books written in other dimensions! These other Urs, as they're called, give us some strange insight into what people may be reading in the world next door. A notable example of which is the idea of a Hemmingway that wrote pot boiler crime novels... it's still definitely his work and style, but something so utterly unexpected that it makes you scratch your head wondering what that would be like.
For writers out there, I'm referring to this as the Ur Challenge, and I got the idea from Oxford Royale.
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| Let's get strange with this! |
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What Styles and Genres Would You Mix and Match?
Folks who are fans of my work know that I am a fan of mixing and blending as much nonsense into the pot as I possibly can. Whether it's an old testament angel navigating the power games of ancient Babylonian gods in downtown L.A., or writing about a team of dishonorably discharged mercenaries taking on the horrors of Lovecraft's mythos, I like to mix and match my nonsense.
You can find those stories in The Rejects and SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror, for those who are curious.
While mixing and matching genres and conventions can be fun, the Ur Challenge takes things a step further. Because it's one thing to imitate the particular style and tradition of a known writer, but it's quite another to take that style, and then attempt to write a completely different genre than that author would ever have tackled.
It's kind of like Post-Modern Jukebox, but for books!
So if you need a bit of inspiration to really get your fingers tuned up for something, ask yourself how you would tackle this prompt. Would you try to write a bodice-ripping romance in the style of H.P. Lovecraft? A post-apocalyptic tale of survival if it were told by Arthur Conan Doyle? A gritty private detective story with all the purple prose of Robert Howard? They sky is the limit, but the very concept can really get your mind moving, so I thought I'd share it this week!
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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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