Pick the kind of story

What it is

Genre is the first choice at Scene, the third step, under Genre or Tone. The genres on offer today are Adventure, Mystery, Fantasy, Everyday Magic, Science Fiction, Fairy Tale, Comedy, Action, Realistic Fiction and Historical Adventure. You pick one for the book, or leave the choice to Bix. Once you have chosen a topic, the genres that suit it best come first, and one that suits it less well is marked as a creative stretch rather than hidden.

What it is for

Every genre carries its own rules, and the writer is held to them in every chapter. A mystery puts every clue on the page before the reveal, and plants a red herring it explains later. Fantasy magic has limits and a cost, and they do not change halfway through. Science fiction has no magic at all, only an invention or a discovery whose workings a child can follow. A fairy tale works in threes and never states its moral. A comedy builds each chapter on a joke that keeps escalating, and pays off its running gag before the end. Everyday magic keeps a real, ordinary place exactly as it is and breaks one rule of reality, never two.

So the same topic told as a mystery and then as an adventure gives you two different plots, not one plot in two moods. When the telling is left to Bix as well, it is chosen to suit the genre, and the artwork is chosen to suit the place and the kind of story together.

How to use it

1. Tap New Adventure and go to Scene, the third step along the top.
2. Tap one genre under Genre or Tone. Every idea you are offered is then that genre. Leave the place and the writing style to Bix, and the ideas are set in different places and told in different voices where the genre allows it.
3. Tap Let Bix choose instead, and each idea usually arrives in a different genre, with the ones this child has read lately passed over. Leave the place to Bix as well and one idea is set somewhere real, one somewhere invented, and one is everyday magic. A writing style or place you picked that suits only one genre keeps all the ideas in it.
4. Read the genre at the top of each card at the Ideas step. Each kind of story wears its own colour.
5. Sort or group Library by genre later, to see which kinds of tale they have had.

What we suggest

Leave it to Bix for the first few books. It will not pick science fiction or historical adventure for a child under seven, or a fairy tale for one over nine, and it passes over what they read lately. Once they start asking for one kind of tale by name, pick it on purpose for a topic they find hard. A subject they resist can go down easier as a mystery to solve.