The Peripatetic Muse: Writing in Multiple Genres

My latest book is just aborning this spring, To the Bones, a satirical genre-fluid novel that draws on Appalachian tales, horror, and romance in its story of three interlocked mysteries in one small mountain town.

It follows a poetry collection, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse (Press 53, 2018) and precedes a work-in-progress, a haibun book tracing my month of solo hiking in the Scottish Highlands while contemplated my mother’s life and death.

How did I come to be wandering across so many genres?

I thought I was to be a poet. First major publication: sixth grade, a high-toned poem about falcons, which I’d seen as a woods-wandering child, and Pavlova, whom I had not. By the time I was in college, however, “All the President’s Men” had turned my attention to journalism, with the promise of a steady if modest paycheck.

I wrote, off and on,  published poems and took part in a poetry group. But I wanted to write novels–insane, surely, because by then I was homesteading a West Virginia hill farm along with covering city hall. So I began writing a science fiction novel – and short stories too, why not, and poems were still coming, and long poems that were stories in verse. My muse, it seemed, had ADD.

Then a writers’ conference brought me to Fred Chappell, an Appalachian writer of magnificent talent generously applied to fiction long and short, poetry epic and lyric. He counseled me to welcome the writing in whatever form it arrived— “more shapes than one,” which is the title of one of his wide-ranging story collections. By the time I left West Virginia for Carolina, I’d been warned it was a species of bad manners to write in too many forms, but Ole Fred said, write what comes, as did Gertrude Stein, who despite her opacity, had this straightforward approach:

“Write without thinking of the result
in terms of a result, but think of the writing
in terms of discovery …

It will come if it is there
and if you will let it come.”

So what are the pros and cons of writing in multiple genres?

First, consider it as cross training.

Maybe you are a poet and you have been thinking about a novel. In sports terms, that would be a sprinter deciding to take on the marathon. Before she could do that, she would have to change her training and develop new muscle sets and learn different skills.  Multiple genres each train a somewhat different part of the writing mind. For me, it feels physically different when I write a poem compared with times when I am working on a novel. Doing both at the same time lets me breathe and opens up space for new writing.

Cross-training combines exercises for various muscle groups and parts of the body. It takes advantage of the particular effectiveness of each training method, while combining it with other methods that address its weaknesses. Jogging is great for endurance and weight loss. Tai chi adds flexibility. Weight lifting builds muscle and increases upper body strength.  You end up with good overall fitness, more strength and stamina, less chance of stress or damage.

And the same with writing–different forms not only challenge your mind to master the techniques, but also liberate it from the treadmill of repetitive motion. You hear dialogue in your poetry, and write detail with a fine-tipped brush in your novels.

I liked what Marge Piercy had to say in this fine essay about the sensation of writing in different forms. “Poetry feels as if I transcend myself while working on what is often very personal material … the “I” is less intrusive, less present, than at any other times except deep meditation.” She points out that in meditation, however, you are seeking to clear the mind, while in writing poetry, we invite in all the images and allusions and thoughts of a busy mind.

We also find different kinds of work in different places, I think. Piercy, again, says that poems come from “memory, fantasy, the need to communicate with the living, the dead, the unborn…out of daily life, from the garden, the cats, the newspaper, the lives of friends, quarrels, a good or bad time in bed, from cooking, from writing itself, from disasters and nuisances, gifts and celebrations.”

The desire to write fiction, however, comes from the part of our minds that want to hear gossip, to learn how the stories come out. “I am a nosy person,” she says, and it is this characteristic that made me a good journalist, and, I hope, a good writer of fiction. We want to weave the threads of numerous lives and make sense of a chaotic world.

Another point in favor of writing across genre lines is its utility in fighting the dreaded writer’s block – because if one thing isn’t flowing, you can work on something else. The Olympic athlete can’t complain that the pool is closed so he’ll just go eat potato chips.

Former U.S. poet laureate William Stafford wrote: “I believe that the so-called ‘writing block’ is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance… One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing… You should be more willing to forgive yourself.”

So you do what you can, and don’t beat yourself up over it. If you revise a poem, that’s progress–work addressed, even if the novel is on hold.

Of course, if there are pros, there must be cons. The most significant is that by working in many areas, you may spread your talents too thinly–and it could affect your career as a writer by diffusing your audience.

     An article in Bustle sums it up nicely: “If you do a quick Google search on advice on writing in more than one genre, you will find the internet will spit back the same warning: don’t do it. Literary agents, critics, and everyday readers seem to share the opinion that crossing genres makes an author less appealing, harder to market, and more difficult to build a brand around.” Then proceeds to show a dozen writers who ignore that advice. I hear the chorus of Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates and Thomas Hardy and Brad Leithauser and Alice Walker and Margaret Atwood and many others–there is joy in crossing boundaries, and I think we can trust astute readers to follow us there.

Ultimately, whether we consider ourselves novelists or poets or multi-genre writers, what we do is a kind of literary echolocation. Richard Wright wrote: “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”

And so speak–shout—write. If that peripatetic muse leaps from chair to desk and onto the window ledge, all you can do is follow.

—

Valerie Nieman’s fourth novel, To the Bones, is a genre-bending satire of the coal industry and its effects on Appalachia. “Evocative, intelligent prose conjures an anxious mood and strong sense of place,” wrote Kirkus Reviews, while Small Press Picks commented, “…like Stephen King’s masterpiece The Dead Zone, Nieman’s novel insightfully portrays the complications of possessing unexpected powers, which rarely are unmitigated blessings.”

Her third poetry collection,Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse, was published in 2018, with work that has appeared in The Missouri Review, Chautauqua, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. Her writing has appeared widely in journals and in numerous anthologies, including Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She has held state and NEA creative writing fellowships. She teaches workshops at John C. Campbell Folk School, NC Writers Network conferences, and many other venues. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte and a former journalist, she was a founding editor of two literary magazines. She teaches creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University.

TO THE BONES

Darrick MacBrehon, a government auditor, wakes among the dead. Bloodied and disoriented from a gaping head wound, the man who staggers out of the mine crack in Redbird, West Virginia, is much more powerful—and dangerous—than the one thrown in. An orphan with an unknown past, he must now figure out how to have a future.

Hard-as-nails Lourana Taylor works as a sweepstakes operator and spends her time searching for any clues that might lead to Dreama, her missing daughter. Could this stranger’s tale of a pit of bones be connected? With help from disgraced deputy Marco DeLucca and Zadie Person, a local journalist  investigating an acid mine spill, Darrick and Lourana push against everyone who tries to block the truth. Along the way, the bonds of love and friendship are tested, and bodies pile up on both sides.

In a town where the river flows orange and the founding—and controlling—family is rumored to “strip a man to the bones,” the conspiracy that bleeds Redbird runs as deep as the coal veins that feed it.

 

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