6 Tips for Transitioning From One Writing Genre to Another
Can you lose your creativity? And if so, can you get it back?
When I was trying to decide whether to take a buyout from The Baltimore Sun after 33 years—10 as a general assignment arts reporter and 23 as The Sun’s theater critic—I contacted playwright Paula Vogel.
(5 Different Forms of Journalism.)
I had interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of How I Learned to Drive many times over the years. And I was the first reporter she spoke to after winning the Pulitzer. This time around, I said: “I’m thinking of leaving The Sun. I don’t know if I have any creativity left, but if I do, I think you can find it.”
Theater reviewing, one of my fellow critics used to say, “is one of the last bastions of firsthand reporting in an age of media events like press conferences and photo ops.” By that measure, I had done a lot of reporting over the decades, but except for the occasional poem or short story, not much creative writing since college.
Now I had a fictitious story I wanted to tell and characters I was eager to share with readers. Without hesitation, Vogel generously invited me to be a visiting student in her graduate playwriting program at Brown University. “There’s one catch,” she added. “You’ll have to write a play.”
The main characters in that play figure prominently in my debut novel, Please Write. An epistolary novel in which two of the three correspondents are dogs, Please Write delivers a distinctive account of the role imagination and love can play in coping with hardship and loss. Released in early November, this quirky book is already garnering positive reviews.
There is no question that Please Write would not be the genre-defying book it became had I not spent a year at Brown, rediscovering my creativity. Below are tips—many inspired by Vogel—that helped me transition from journalism to creative writing, from nonfiction to fiction.
“Do something every day that scares you.”
These are Eleanor Roosevelt’s words, not mine, but they were my watchwords throughout the time I was working on Please Write. I’m not suggesting death-defying feats. I am recommending that you experiment with something new. Write a play, for instance, and, after that, write a novel about typewriting dogs—a serious novel with lots of humor.
(6 Things Writers Should Know About Dogs and Their Bond With Humans.)
Color outside the lines.
Just because something hasn’t been done before, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a try. Indeed, that may be the very reason to try it. Can’t find any precedents for epistolary novels with canine correspondents? Set the precedent yourself.
In 1998, the same year Vogel won the Pulitzer, I attended a playwriting workshop she gave in Washington D.C. for the media. Vogel believes anyone can write a play; she has taught workshops to prisoners, military veterans, boards of trustees, and in this case, the press.
In the morning, Vogel gave an abbreviated summary of her philosophy of playwriting. It’s a very practical philosophy built on: Get it done, but have fun doing it.
To illustrate that point, during lunch she assigned us to write one of three short plays: 1) A play about a dog; 2) A monologue; or 3) A play that is impossible to stage. Unable to choose and unwilling to follow instructions, I wrote a dog’s inner monologue. In the afternoon, several of us read our plays out loud. At the end of the workshop, she told me: “You could do this.”
Check out J. Wynn Rousuck’s Please Write here:
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“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Credit for this advice goes to Samuel Beckett. Fear of making mistakes can impede creativity. To put it another way, always follow the same safe path and you might get bored. And believe me, if the writer’s bored, the reader definitely will be. That’s true even in journalism.
As a reporter, I didn’t have the luxury of looking at the world through a dog’s eyes. But as a novelist, I could experiment with whatever viewpoint best suited the material. And so, two literate terriers became my chief storytellers.
Seek out—revel in!—unlikely juxtapositions.
This is based on an exercise Vogel calls a “bake-off.” Seemingly unrelated ingredients are blended into a play. This can also work in a short story or a novel. Some of the disparate ingredients in Please Write include: A meatloaf recipe, kindergarten, a customs declaration, Shakespeare, a social promotion, the White House, and of course, dogs.
Make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
This is Paula Vogel via the Russian literary theorist, Viktor Shklovsky. Here are two examples from Vogel’s plays: On the surface, How I Learned to Drive is about a teenage girl getting driving lessons from her uncle; below the surface, it is about painful, repressed truths. In The Baltimore Waltz, a terminally ill elementary school teacher and her brother take a wacky European tour in hopes of finding a cure; the reality underlying this tour hits heartrendingly close to home.
In my novel, Please Write, a pair of Baltimore dogs exchange letters with a Midwestern artist. The dogs are owned by a harried journalist whose marriage is unraveling. The artist lives with the journalist’s mother. Who is really writing these letters? And why? Maybe dogs can write things their humans cannot.
Research, research, research—then stop.
I am a research-aholic. I’m also an expert at using research as an excuse not to write. For Please Write, I consulted epistolary novels; books about grief; manuals on dog breeds, behavior and training; novels, plays, films, and memoirs about dogs. I read Franz Kafka, Eugene O’Neill and Virginia Woolf. I discovered that Thomas Mann’s daughter taught her English Springer Spaniel to type (you can watch this on YouTube). And I kept a well-worn copy of Don Marquis’ early 20th century newspaper columns about Archy, the typewriting cockroach, and Mehitabel, the alley cat, on my bedside table.
All of this was helpful and, in the best cases, inspiring. But you reach a point where you need to take your nose out of books and put your fingers on the keyboard.
That’s a good place for me to follow my own advice and get back to work on my collection of linked short stories. So far, I’ve got a rundown motel, a retired racing Greyhound, a saxophone, a professional baseball player, a park full of broken statues, and a con artist. If I blend them together with a bit of fear, a few broken rules, judicious research, some detours for mistakes, and my resurrected creativity, who knows? The result might be my next book.