Jumping Genres

Can you ruin your career by writing in multiple genres?

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Jumping Genres

Can you ruin your career by writing in multiple genres?

For a long time, I called myself a poet and did not deviate from that label. I held a steadfast loyalty to a literary genre because of what it had given me. I came late to poetry, and poetry was a lifeline to me during a breakdown.

I’ve been writing with the goal of building a career as a writer for seventeen years now and have a decent track record: Four full poetry collections, two pamphlets, a play that almost made it onto the stage (twice!), a memoir and now I’m writing a novel. Every time I am embedded in a new project, I feel sure that this is who I will be for the rest of my life. Maybe one day it will be. Maybe I shall be a novelist from here on out. But I doubt it. For me, a creative project needs to find its own form. This is a long process: a new project is a watery, insubstantial thing for a long time. The play I mentioned earlier, as an example, has been a play, a one-person dialogue, a short story and is currently a novel, which is on the back burner of my brain. It has not found its form yet, but it feels like it is getting close.

You can pour water into all sorts of things, and some of them will hold it, but not all of them will take the water further and give it new purpose and life.

There is an artistic freedom in not being attached to a single literary genre, and I like that. But it also leaves me struggling to know how others perceive me as a creative. Labels are a kind of persona that one can exist in. You can walk into a literary event and tell people what you are, set up their expectations. You can introduce yourself as your label to someone outside of the literary world and, with luck, they will know what that is. When I introduced myself in

Victoria MacKenzie

‘s historical fiction group last week, I prefaced telling the group about my novel in progress by telling them that I was ‘mostly known as a poet’. This is something of an oxymoron. I am known as a poet if you know poetry. But still I reached for the comfort blanket of a label.

What happens when you jump between genres, or sub genres, and are known as a writer, rather than a specific type of writer? How do you find that creative identity?

And does it matter?

A couple of years ago the topic of conversation in the literary world was whether we needed to be quite so reliant on labelling literature. I was drawn to this article in The Guardian, mainly because my literary God, Hilary Mantel had something to say about it.

“In those days historical fiction wasn’t respectable or respected,” she recalled. “It meant historical romance. If you read a brilliant novel like I, Claudius, you didn’t taint it with the genre label, you just thought of it as literature. So, I was shy about naming what I was doing. All the same, I began. I wanted to find a novel I liked, about the French Revolution. I couldn’t, so I started making one.”

Hilary Mantel

It surprises me that Mantel, who I think of as being very robust in her creative decisions, should be so concerned with how people would perceive her work. One of the things I admired the most about Hilary Mantel was her ability to keep the craft and the process as her primary focus, but without losing the desire to bite into the literary world and prove her worth. She had a career in mind when she was writing. I would like to know what her thought processes were about what to conform to and what to push back against. But we never will now.

Success as a constraint to creativity

If you google the question, the general advice is that writing across literary genres, even/especially writing across sub genres, is unadvisable if you want to be a successful writer. There are countless publishers, agents and writing advisers who will tell you that building a specific audience base is the key to being successful, and if you jump between genres then you will never have that stable base. But bear in mind that articles on the internet are not a good source of advice, they are most often about generating clicks, and the trend with all news now is to do that by invoking fear. In this case, the fear of making the wrong choice and ruining your writing career because of it. I would argue that being a cross-genre writer never did Margaret Atwood (fiction, poetry, non-fiction, memoir, essays) or Hilary Mantel (fiction, essays, reviews, memoir) any harm, and I know many poets who write novels or have written memoir. But I also know how hard it is to be taken seriously in one genre if you are known for writing in another genre. The world loves a label. And with all due respect, Margaret Atwood and the blessed Hilary Mantel were not starting out building a career in a world where, like it or not, you will have a responsibility to promote your work. This is made harder if you are writing across genres, because you are crossing over audiences. We, writers, are up against it. The world is changing. Is it better to aim for success and nail your colours to the mast, to say I am a poet, I am a novelist, I am a memoirist and make it easier for publishers and agents to identify and sell your work. Or is it better to follow the path of the project, letting it find the structure that will enhance the content. What is success as a writer if you can’t be free to write in new and interesting ways, if you can’t have the freedom to work.

I asked my own agent Caro Clarke for her thoughts on cross genre writers, and how the industry perceives a writer who hasn’t yet decided what they want to be when they grow up.

“I love this topic because for every example of a writer who ‘stayed in their lane’ and only wrote one specific genre, there are countless others who thrive writing a variety of genres. I think that an author and their authorial voice so to speak, have a distinct flavour and this voice usually carries across genres. It may be the style of writing – lyrical or sparse – or it may be the topics they write about – feminism, power or nature. There is always something that makes me come back to an author and it’s their specific take on a topic. For example, I don’t read many articles on the Royal family, but when Hilary Mantel wrote one, I immediately wanted to read it because I knew she would pick up on things that someone who only writes about it wouldn’t necessarily notice. It’s that point of difference that makes a cross-genre writer stand out.

While it is harder than ever to get published now, I would say that it is harder to stay relevant and keep hold of people’s attention if you only write the same book again and again. It may also be dispiriting for a writer who may feel pressured to deliver the same idea again and again. If a writer is passionate about what they are writing, it shows. Additionally, audiences usually span several medium: if I’m interested in a topic, I may watch a film about it, read a fiction title on it or watch a documentary / read a non-fiction book on the topic (as well as podcasts, etc). By writing across genres but in the same thematic space, you are essentially broadening your readership by giving readers different entry points to your writing. Someone who enjoyed your memoir and life story, may well be keen to read a novel written by you.

In the UK, look at writers like Cathy Rentzenbrink, Kit de Waal, Patience Agbabi, Damian Barr, Derek Owusu, Melissa Harrison, Helen Oyeyemi, Isabel Waidner, Kerry Hudson, Dean Atta, Juno Dawson and so many more. I can also point to a large majority of my list because I especially love writers that write across genres. I think poets have a very specific way to bring a narrative (whether fiction or non-fiction) to life in their prose and fiction writers tend to really bring out people in their narrative non-fiction. I also think that non-fiction writers bring with them a sense of structure in a novel. And long form writers bring a sense of storytelling across a collection of poems. Ultimately, I think it’s a positive to be adaptable in your writing practice. It may not bring you the fame and riches of a dedicated audience in one genre but it has been harder to maintain a career so legacy authors are harder to come by”

What I know is this. I feel happiest when I am working within themes that interest me, rather than specific literary genres. I have so much further I want to go as a writer, so much more I want to explore. It feels brave to be giving my all to the new novel. It’s a pure, clean feeling of commitment, the sort of decisive fresh start that I love. Considering how attached to the label of poet I was for the first eight or nine years of my career; I find the idea of only ever telling a story through one medium claustrophobic.

Instead of labelling myself by genre, I feel that my work is based around cohesive themes that re occur whatever I am working on: history; the idea of people being people, the rural experience, grief and childlessness are big themes in my work, as is the interior lives of people; women in particular, how we perceive and are perceived, the working-class experience. Those are themes, not labels and it feels much more comfortable to sit in that identity, for me.

What are the practical realities of writing cross genre?

I’ve found it most difficult when I have had two books in two different genres out at the same time. I had a poetry collection and the paperback of my memoir out within a few weeks of each other last year. It was like having two squalling chicks in a nest, both wanting feeding at the same time. The bigger, hungrier chick was the memoir, it came with more offers of work and less having to find the offers myself, and therefore for my mental health it got fed more. I learned several lessons when this happened. One of them was, once again, about setting my own boundaries. What other parts of my writing life would I sacrifice for promotion of either project, what worked within the mental-healthy lifestyle I’ve worked so hard for, how can I avoid burnout? I set aside a certain amount of time, a series of events to promote the poetry collection for free, or for much lower pay than I would expect for the memoir, because that’s poetry for you. It is a different beast. Different genres have different expectation around work.

How has it affected my follower counts and subscriber counts on Substack?

If you are a Substack writer you might want to know how being cross genre has specifically affected my Substack subscriber count.

I am a writer and my substack is about writing. But there has been a shift in what I post. When I first set up Notes from the Margin, it was a part of a plan to move away from running prompt a day poetry courses on Facebook. I wanted to leave Facebook, and I wanted somewhere where I could combine the courses I ran with a blog about the writer life. I could be accessible here, low-cost monthly payments for people who wanted a steady stream of help. My Substack has evolved over the years. Over the last six months I have begun posting with more intention, moving towards more thought pieces, more memoir pieces, posting as a writer, about my writing, posting around the themes in my work, over specific ‘how to’ posts for writers. If I can do this while also helping people to write, and find the courage to place themselves in the way of creativity along the way, then that makes me happy. But this does mean that followers who wanted ‘how to’ posts about becoming a writer and prompt-a-day poetry courses won’t get what they need here and will leave. That’s ok. They need to find what’s right for them. I know that this post will probably be one of those posts that see a reduction in one type of follower.

But, what is also happening is that new followers, and the ones that remain, are my core audience, they are people who may well like my poetry, but are also interested in thoughtful essays, history, novels, landscape, nature, ideas around existing in the world when you feel like you are too odd, big, childless etc. These are my people. Thank you, I’m glad you are here.

How I’m aligning my sub stack to being a cross genre writer? Now see my substack as an open-ended writing project in which I explore the world around me, as a writer, as a creative, and share that here.

My subscriber base is evolving alongside me, because I am becoming the writer I desire to be. My core audience is engaged with that writer. You can’t have growth without change. But change doesn’t come without cost. I feel a slight sense of grief for the stability of this previous embodiment of my writing career, and that comes with a knee jerk reaction to apologise for changing, to not change. But it also comes with a sense of emergence and clarity, a clean, clear feeling of direction.

I don’t know what the future of my writing will be, or what genres I’ll write in, or if I’ll go ‘back’ to poetry or continue to write novels, but for me the integrity of the creative experience is at the heart of my career choices, and I know I will be happy that I pushed my writing into new and exciting places.

It is an adventure, the writer life, and one that I intend to enjoy.

Until next time

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