Genre Gleaning

Apply the strengths of one to another

                                                  ~~~ photo by Quaritsch Photography on Unsplash

This is perhaps an odd little piece to throw out into our writing world… but worth consideration. In the coming year, I’m hoping to have more Q&As with writers practicing in a breadth of genres. We have an upcoming middle-grade writer early in 2022, and I’m looking forward to that!

Even if you consider yourself to be “only a fiction writer” (!) there is much to be learned from working in other forms, much that can be brought into your fictional work. Even if you don’t actively practice another form, mulling through possibilities is useful.

For example: What is the “spatial” quality of stage-writing in a novel? Situating characters on an island? in a room?

What happens when you zero in on “single-focus” in a chapter? Especially if you’ve been struggling with structure—this might be a guiding way to work. And so on.

Always learning…

We have until December 8 to post new pieces in the on-going mini-course: consider trying something in a genre or form that is new to you. “Trying” is the operative word here.

There should be a “genre wheel”—something like the circle of fifths in music—that reveals what can be gleaned from one genre or form to inform another.

But for now here are some thoughts on the strenths; you can dream up potential crossovers:

• from screen and stage and dramatic forms— the power of dialogue and sub-text; how to use objects, the potentially symbolic, and visuals; spacial awareness (theatre in particular here!); story structure in acts and scenes (Note—so much to be learned from this “structure” for the novel writer. In response to a subscriber question about outlining, I will be posting a piece on Robert McKee’s tome on screen-writing, Story. Watch for it.)

• from poetry—language: sound and rhythm; what the little black marks look like on the page; how they are on the page.

• from picturebook writing—keeping to a singular focus, even as you build layered meanings (great for short story writing); working with poetic language; working with the drama of page turns.

• from early readers—(kindergarten to grade 2) the use of white space; using dialogue to move a story and to evoke character and emotion in the cleanest strokes.

• from middle-grade novels—the rhythm of short chapters; developing clear language; creating chapters and stories in which “something happens”—meandering has to be minimal.

• from YA/teen fiction—getting closely inside a—necessarily-so!—self-centered head. Finding and creating immediacy/urgency.

• short fiction: consider each iteration from 6-word stories, 50, 100, 500, 1,000. You might start with something longer, and distil. And distil again.

  For years the first draft of every picturebook I wrote averaged 2500 words, which I would carve down to 600, and now more like 450 words.

  Consider Hemingway’s famous 6 word story: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Or perhaps it should be infamous with that word “sale”—who sells such? Every word counts multiple times over in this form. It could be an exercise just to ponder each of these six words, and consider how you would alter, and what each contributes.

• long fiction—all the other areas I’m writing about here bring some piece to long form fiction. Long form, if you practice it, brings persistance to your work. How to focus for months, even years. How to dig deeply.

• song-writing—the “singular focus” of picturebooks is even simpler when working with music; it might seem as if it’s very much connected with poetry, but while songwriting uses poetic device, it is not poetry. Repetition can be key, and can build.

• creative nonfiction—research skills! Almost all writing needs research skills. And I say “almost” only because I do know a handful of writers who eschew research when writing fiction. But research for me, for fiction (novels) has run anywhere from digging up everything I could about what was Thunder Bay, Ontario, in the 1870s (when it was Port Arthur’s Landing and Fort William), to scrutinizing my little brother’s videos of his free-style cycling—which meant stopping the tapes and asking, “Did that hurt?”, then writing a description of my character doing the same move, having my brother review my descriptions… and so on. I’ve frequently had to explore the daily realities of how characters make their livelihood… And so on: fiction is full of research.

• memoir—digging deeply into the self. Writing memoir caused me to re-think my approach to creating fictional characters. And because it does not have to be linear—in the way of autobiography—it opened me up to a more recursive consideration of exploring “character.”

Really, each of these areas could be thoroughly expanded—poetry, for instance, in its myriad forms, each with its own worth and contribution.

But I’m hoping this opens a conversation: what have you discovered about working in another form? Or perhaps you see a form here with some element to explore to strengthen your fiction.

Thoughts? Questions? Post away!