Four fairy tales. Forty genres. One grid.
Pick a story, pick a genre, and read what happens when The Three Little Pigs is retold as film noir, cosmic horror, a courtroom transcript, or a 1950s suburban mystery. Every cell is narrated aloud in a voice designed for that genre — a weathered cowhand for the Western, a whisper for the cosmic horror — in English and in Spanish.
Built as a classroom tool for teaching genre, voice, and craft.
Ask a class what "genre" means and you get a list of shelves at a bookstore. Genre is not a shelf. It is a set of promises about tone, pacing, what counts as a threat, and what an ending is allowed to feel like. The fastest way to see that is to hold the plot completely still and change nothing but the genre.
So the plot never changes. Three pigs, three houses, one wolf, every single time. What changes is everything else — and once a student sees the same events become a police procedural, a myth, and a slapstick cartoon, the concept stops being vocabulary and starts being a tool they can use in their own writing.
- Read two cells side by side. What did the genre demand be added? What did it quietly delete?
- Predict before revealing. Give students the logline for a cell and have them draft the opening line, then compare against the version here.
- Hear the difference. Every cell is narrated in a voice designed for its genre — in English and in Spanish — making tone audible for students who do not catch it on the page.
- Print the two sheets. The Handout explains what genre is and walks the machine's four lenses — Setting / World Building, Tone & Atmosphere, Character Traits & Motivation, Language / Syntax — with a word wall for the terms inside them. The Genre Activity then hands students a fable the machine deliberately does not carry, The Tortoise and the Hare: they explore five or six genres, choose the two that surprised them most, and describe each shift lens by lens against a worked Wilderness / Survival example. Both print on one landscape page.
A static site — no build step, no framework, no dependencies. Open index.html
and it runs.
| Path | What it holds |
|---|---|
index.html |
The whole app: markup, styles hook-up, and app logic |
handout.html |
Printable handout: what genre is, the four lenses, a word wall |
activity.html |
Printable activity: shift The Tortoise and the Hare through the lenses |
data/stories.js |
Stories, genres, and loglines for all 164 cells |
Stories/ |
One markdown file per story x genre — where the writing happens |
data/scripts-generated.js |
Generated: merges the markdown scripts over stories.js |
tools/sync_scripts.py |
Reads Stories/ and regenerates the file above |
tools/narrate.py |
Sends a script to a local text-to-speech API and saves the audio |
assets/audio/ |
Pre-rendered narration, played directly by the browser |
Each markdown file carries a voice_prompt in its frontmatter — a plain-English
description of how that genre should sound. tools/narrate.py sends the prompt
and the script to Voice Creator Pro running locally,
saves the resulting WAV into assets/audio/, saves the designed voice so it can
be reused, and writes the voice ID back into the markdown.
python tools/narrate.py 01 08 03 # narrate three genres of The Three Little Pigs
python tools/sync_scripts.py # push markdown edits into the siteThe hosted copy has no access to a local API, so it plays the pre-rendered files — which now cover every cell in both languages.
git clone https://github.com/Kaminczak/genre-machine.git
cd genre-machine
python -m http.server 8123Then open http://127.0.0.1:8123/index.html. On Windows, serve.cmd does the
same thing with a double-click. Serving over HTTP rather than opening the file
directly matters only if you want live narration — browsers block a file://
page from calling a local API.
Complete. All four tales are written across all forty genres — 164 cells with full prose, an illustration for every cell, and narration in both English and Spanish for every cell. Two printable classroom sheets (the Handout and the Create a Genre activity) ship alongside the machine.
Written and built by Steve Kaminczak.