← Handout Back to the machine

One landscape page. The example is done; students run two genres of their own through the four lenses.

Create a Genre

Feed in one story · turn the lenses · print a new world
Name
Date
Class
Fig. 1, The Genre Machine: an original tale passes through four lenses — Tone/Atmosphere, Setting/World Building, Character Traits/Motivation, Language/Syntax — into a synthesized genre and out as the retold tale.
Instructions
  1. Explore. Run each story through at least 5 or 6 genres on the Genre Machine — watch how the setting, tone, characters, and language react.
  2. Choose. Pick the two genres that surprised you most.
  3. Analyze. Fill in the chart for your two — 1–2 sentences per lens, the way the example does it.
The Tortoise and the Hare, the original tale
The Tortoise & the Hare The story itself never changes: the hare brags, the hare naps, the tortoise keeps walking, the tortoise wins. Everything else is yours to transform.
The Lenses(describe each shift)
Example GenreWilderness / Survival
Genre 1 
Genre 2 
Setting /
World Building		 The sunny forest path becomes a frozen wilderness above the treeline — gray sky, deep snowdrifts, wind-scoured pines, and a finish line that means shelter.
Tone &
Atmosphere		 The playful, fable-like tone shifts into a stark, high-stakes survival struggle where death and freezing temperatures replace cartoon whimsy.
Character Traits
& Motivation		 The hare and the tortoise become humanized wilderness survivors and rivals, defined by physical endurance, practical labor, and instinct rather than anthropomorphic silliness.
Language /
Syntax		 The repetitive, whimsical phrasing of the original story is replaced with clipped, minimalist sentences and sparse, muscular prose that mirror the urgency and coldness of the environment.