A Writer’s Identity Crisis: Writing in Multiple Genres

Guest blogger, Louella Bryant

You have a story—or at least an emotion—burning to find its way to the page. But how to write it? Lots of writers believe that instead of deciding what we’re going to write, the work finds us, whether it’s fact, fiction, or feeling. And then the hard part—releasing the story to find its own form. Stuart Dybek intended his award-winning story “We Didn’t” to be a poem, but it wanted to be a short story. He has always thought of the story as a “failed poem” because he began as a response to another poem. As it turned out, the story chose correctly, and his poetry failure became a success.

John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, E. B. White, Anton Chekhov, and even—or perhaps especially—William Shakespeare wrote in a variety of genres. Mary Karr published three volumes of poetry before getting The Liar’s Club into print, her memoir that became a best seller. The success of that book prompted her to write a follow-up memoir, which made enough money so that she could afford to go back to poetry with her reputation firmly established.

Writing in multiple forms is enough to give a writer an identity crisis.

When I began my MFA work, I had already published a novel for young adults—The Black Bonnet—set just before the Civil War. Although I made up elements of the story, I incorporated historical characters. The setting is Burlington, Vermont, where two slave sisters have arrived on their flight from a Virginia plantation to freedom in Canada. Joshua Young was actually the minister of the Unitarian Church where the girls first hid away, and Lucius Bigelow, who helped them escape a bounty hunter, was in fact a conductor on the underground railroad. Other fugitives in the story are historically documented, and the sisters themselves are based on real people—older sister Bea on Harriet Jacobs, who wrote her own memoir about escaping slavery, and younger sister Charity on Phillis Wheatley, a slave who wrote stunningly beautiful poetry. The story itself is pure imagination, but it incorporates so many factual elements that many schools in New England use the novel in their units on nineteenth century history.

The book did well enough that my publisher asked me to write another historical novel for young adults. I produced Father By Blood, about John Brown’s famous raid on Harper’s Ferry, which came even closer to historical fact than The Black Bonnet. Okay—mission accomplished. Now I could devote myself to an adult novel.

Or so I thought.

In 2003 I was working on a novel set during World War II when a copy of Rolling Stone arrived in the mailbox with Howard Dean on the cover. At that point he was the frontrunner in the campaign for U.S. President. The inside story talked about Howard’s brother Charlie, who went missing in Laos in 1974.

My husband had gone to boarding school with the Dean boys and later lived on a farm in Australia with Charlie. When he started talking about the farm in Far North Queensland and Charlie’s disappearance, I said, “This sounds like a book.” He produced letters, photos and a journal, and I contacted Howard, who offered to write the foreword to the book.

After I drafted the book, I sent out proposals to publishers. Nada. I worked on revisions and kept sending out the manuscript, getting nicer and nicer rejections—but rejections nonetheless. Friends asked why I didn’t rewrite the story as a novel, but I wanted to honor the truth about Charlie’s death. Four years and many rejections later, Black Lawrence Press published While In Darkness There Is Light, my first nonfiction book.

An obituary in The New York Times led writer John Grisham to write his first work of nonfiction, The Innocent Man. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Grisham said the nonfiction volume took him twice as long to write as a novel, and ultimately he was sued by the district attorney and investigator in the case for the way he depicted them in the book. I haven’t been sued (I was careful to get signed permissions from everyone mentioned in my book), but I agree with Grisham that writing about living people is tricky—and time consuming.

While I had my nose in the Australian adventure, I published some short stories, a couple of essays, a children’s picture book, and two poems. But I was still burning to write that novel. A novel seems daunting. How do you hold both ends in your hands and see it as a whole? Was my novel really a series of short stories, or was I writing something else entirely?

Actually, I was probably asking the wrong questions. What I should have asked about the World War II novel—or any work in progress, for that matter—is, what is its purpose? The purpose—and the process of determining the purpose—is closely related to the reader’s purpose in reading it. Essentially, when you’ve defined the purpose, you influence the choices you make about the form you want to use.

My purpose in writing While In Darkness was not only to honor Charlie’s memory but to answer the question about why young people—young men especially—take life-threatening risks. With The Black Bonnet, I tried to show that young people in another time had similar fears, dreams, hopes, and obstacles as teenagers today.

The decision about genre is crucial since form can affect how the writing is received by readers. Romance writers—in general—know better what their market wants than any other genre’s writers. Whether you want to titillate, amuse, investigate, connect, enlighten or capture an emotion, you may already have some clue about the ways these different literary forms are interpreted by the audience—and what works most effectively with your chosen subject matter.

As with many writers, what I’ve realized is that you may not always get the genre right the first time. You may have written a story when an essay would have been more effective, given your topic. Or, perhaps, in your effort to state the facts as you see them or to shape them into a persuasive essay, you missed the pleasure of sharing your feelings in a poem or the lyrics of song.

The point is not to force your work to become something it doesn’t want to be. Write the best piece you can write. Apply writerly craft to bring the piece to its highest potential. When it’s ready, send it out. If you’ve done your work, the piece—novel, story, essay, poem, kid lit, screenplay, script, or a combination—will find its audience.

Louella Bryant is the author of the award winning books While In Darkness There Is Light, documenting young expatriates living in Australia during the Vietnam era, and Full Bloom, a collection of short stories. She has published three books for children and young adults and has been awarded numerous prizes for her short stories, poems and essays, which have appeared in magazines and anthologies. In addition to her work on the faculty of the Spalding University MFA in Writing program, Louella mentors students at the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf and teaches creative writing and writing instruction courses in Vermont, where she lives with her husband Harrison Reynolds. Visit her website at www.louellabryant.com.

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