Today, when I attend a writer’s conference, I hear the same advice from editors and agents: Don’t write in multiple genres. Stick to one.
As an English major, this comes as something of a change in policy in the writing world. I mean, look, start with Poe. He’s famous for poems, stories, and novels. Or Thomas Hardy. When I was taking a British Literature course in college, we read Hardy’s sad, powerful novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I had also read Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and had become aware that he was seen as an important novelist. Though some critics objected to the pessimism and economic determinism that tended to drive his plots, I couldn’t get through a class in British Literature without reading him.
Then, we turned to poetry of the early 20th century, and there I discovered that Hardy had, after a career as a novelist, turned to poetry and wrote nothing but that for the remainder of his life. One could argue that we read all of this stuff by Hardy because our teacher had focused on the novelist in his dissertation. But Hardy’s poems were not amateurish. They were taken by critics–at the time of this class in 1976–as significant.
Many other writers have done the same, or done something similar. D.H. Lawrence was also both a novelist and poet. And he turned to the essay for various reasons–perhaps most famously to criticize the religious fundamentalists he had been raised among.
Flannery O’Connor was most successful with stories, but she wrote two novels, and she muddled around with nonfiction pieces and university “talks” she gave that are probably as famous today as her stories. Some of them have helped people understand her stories. I mean, aside from her talk about a movement of grace, how is “A Good Man is Hard to Find” not the most vile, demeaning nihilistic writing done by a devout Catholic? I know. In her nonfiction, she tells us how it’s not. Authorial intention lives. But she’s also working out what she thought in those pieces also, all worthwhile.
Or how about J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis? I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings as a sophomore in high school in 1971, and I wanted more. I found a book that included “On Fairy Stories” and “Leaf by Niggle,” I think it was called, the first a dense nonfiction piece that develops Tolkien’s ideas about fantasy and eucatastrophe, I think. With Lewis, there must be at least three writers: the man of apologetics and Christian living, the science fiction author, and then children stories. I’ve met people who only know him for Narnia.
These were my early mentors, the writers I spent my free time reading when I was growing up. Lewis, Tolkien, Ray Bradbury. Later, Flannery O’Connor. I think of them as mentors–for writers mentors include all those writers we loved and read. So for me the question wasn’t, why can’t we practice different genres? It was, we should be, right?
Or, consider the world of music. Brahms and his first piano concerto: First, it was going to be a symphony. Then it was a duet for two pianos, then a symphony again. Then it became his first piano concerto. My understanding is that the composer was under some real anxiety trying to write a meaningful symphony after Beethoven. I can relate to that anxiety. Looking around at all the great books being written every day, I can understand such anxiety.
Nevertheless, even with all this evidence from the past, this is the stuff that comes from being an English major. When I talk to editors today, it seems like it was a set up for some other world–perhaps the writing world of the past.
And I do know and understand the real import of the warnings that most editors and agents give, and it is an important consideration: Can we writers succeed, especially in Christian markets, if we write in more than one genre? This is a question that mainly concerns marketing and making money. It is the main concern of editors and agents. And they are right. If you write a successful book in one genre, you will have readers waiting for your next one. They will want to read more of the same. And they will share their love of your work with their friends. If, like me, you follow a novel with a chapbook of poetry, you might have a tougher climb. This is just simply going against good marketing advice.
What I’d like to talk about, then, in light of this, is why we might want to explore different genres anyway beyond the fact that it’s fun and not limiting. Not only can we reflect the wider reading we like to do, we can really explore some of our major life themes by trying different kinds of writing with them. And it just might help us to find our real voice and calling. I’d like to first talk about some writers who work in different genres and how it helped them. Then I’ll talk about how I came to write in different genres. And I’d like to suggest, as one writer to another, some practical measures about how to go on this journey of writing in multiple genres.
More Testimonials
Before I go to my second point, I’d like to list some writers who genre switch in today’s market. Genre switching has helped some to find their voice and success as writers. Annie Dillard began as a poet, but after turning to the essay, she wrote that it was like moving from playing a flute to having the entire orchestra at her command. Similarly, Anne Lamott began as a novelist, but it is her nonfiction, her memoir of her son’s first year and her books about her writing life that most readers keep going back to.
George Saunders has moved from critical commentary and essays in The Brain Dead Megaphone and a career in writing short fiction to composing a gripping historical novel of grief with fantastical elements in his Lincoln in the Bardo.
Of equal interest is finding a writer working on the same experience in two different genres. A few years ago, when I was teaching a creative nonfiction class, I brought in work by Judith Ortiz Coffer, which included reading and discussing a nonfiction narrative about an experience she had also cast in poetry.
How similar the two works were. And yet, though both conveyed the experience of her family’s having a flat tire at the edge of a field of sugar cane, how different was the focus of each. With the greater space and structure of nonfiction allowing her to give a fuller context to her family and her father’s personality, Ortiz Coffer was able explore her father’s fearfulness.
So many writers have crossed boundaries like this. Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Atlantic Monthly correspondent, author of The Water Dancer, a novel of slavery in Virginia that also has elements of magical realism in it, gives evidence for the debasement of slavery, the breaking up of black families, the hypocrisy of slave owners. But it is his memoir, Between the World and Me, written as an extended letter to his son, where his personal experience allows him to lay bare the nerves of modern racism and requires all readers, including those he refers to as believers in the dream that they are white, to confront the ongoing criminalizing of black skin.
My Path
My writing path is a bit individual. In fact, if I don’t call it a path, it really looks like a mess. If I call it that, I can start to see it somewhat meaningfully. I don’t think that writing and life can be separated. What happened to me–I didn’t expect things to happen the way that they did—won’t happen to you. It depends on what you’ve done with life already and what you will do.
In the eighties and nineties, I wrote poems and stories. I published three of them. In the nineties, after I wrote three novels that are still sitting in my bottom clothes drawer, I went into a PhD program. In 2008 I wrote a First-year writing textbook that grew out of my research as a graduate student and my teaching here. As I said, I was also working on other things—nonfiction essays, a novel, poetry. Before I wrote and finally published my novel in 2017, I began a memoir about my sister, who died in a car accident in 1984. I worked at that memoir for over a year and my writing group noted that it didn’t work. However, I have noticed work on that coming out recently in poems and in a short story that works really well and is in my collection. So I consider that memoir to be worth the work.
After the memoir, I dug out my novel again and decided to revise it. It was published in 2017, and I had an idea growing for a second novel and was going to get started on that immediately, when my youngest son, Michael, took his life, three weeks after the novel was published. After that, I found it difficult to think. The day after we lost him, I began writing in a journal, and in the journal I started just writing everything I could to remember him. I started writing some poems. Until that time, poems always came to me like photographs. They would be on any topic, often the past intruding on the present. I would be somewhere with someone and see something, and language would come so that I could write it down. In grief, language would come and I would write it down, most of the time just miserable stuff. I gave myself permission to write bad poetry. I found myself reading many grief memoirs written by parents for their lost children. A big part of my healing has come from a survivors group I attend, from reading, and from writing.
So, a year into grieving, instead of writing a second novel, I began to write a memoir of my son—which I’m still working on. At the same time, I wrote and had more poems published and started submitting this as a chapbook around to different publishers. My poems were accepted by one press, but then I posted this on FB and a poet friend warned me away from that press. So I submitted to another and within one night, it was accepted. I was amazed.
The Path From Here
Writing in different genres is, to me, healthy. I never want to get away from this. I like the idea of play. That’s where most of my writing starts, because if I am honest, saying I’m a writer is quite pretentious to say and believe about yourself. But playing, that’s just productive. Another aspect of this is really exploring your themes.
What I am suggesting here can be taken as a generative exercise during revision. Practice your writing and explore your ideas in all genres. Get to know writing in all fields.
As I noted above, five years ago I wrote the rough draft of a memoir about my sister’s death in a car accident in 1984. The memoir didn’t work. My critique group confirmed my own reading of it. The account lacked the details to bring things to life. It lacked the clear purpose I thought that I’d been developing in it. However, two years ago, the work I’d done in that failed memoir served to help with the main content of a short story I was working on in my collection. The story, “Man in the Army Jacket without Medals,” is one of the central stories in Subtle Man Loses His Day Job and Other Stories. The small autobiographical details that appear in the story give it a power that the memoir I wrote doesn’t have. At this point, I may never publish the memoir. Recently, my daughter wanted to read it for what she could learn about her grandfather, and that is interesting. As for the story I was interested in telling, I think now that the compression of the short story form allowed me to get at what was most true in my experience of what happened in those events, more so than in a memoir that took over 200 pages to write.
I have also found a deepening of my language use after writing poetry, though my original intent was to follow my first novel with a second. However, right after publishing my first novel, my youngest son took his life. This tragedy sent me into unexpected directions where I found myself unable to write anything but journal entries, out of which poetry began to emerge. Writing my poetry chapbook had more to do with my grief than it did with building a career, but The View from January became the first place where I could process what had happened.
I was writing these poems at the same time that I was composing a novel narrative in which a man grieves his son’s suicide. Today, I suspect that this narrative was about me writing through my trauma.
I have sometimes switched to poetry to learn more. I have also sometimes switched genres just to see what might happen. Currently, I am engaged in writing a story out of the last poem in my chapbook. I am excited about this, because the poem is in subtle ways about the afterlife, and I am very interested in what I am going to discover in this genre switch.
In all of these experiences, the first focus is to learn more about my subject. There is also much to learn about voice in this. The idea that I’ve been able to publish in different genres has been an added bonus.
I’d love to hear about further adventures you’ve had in the genres you call your own.
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