Cross Genre and Automatic Writing

Jul 24, 2021 12:53 am

Does writing stories longhand change your genre?

Book reviewers are the best people in the world.

Last night I had a sudden memory of a short story I’d done at Clarion. Jeff VanderMeer was our teacher, and he gave us the characters and basic outline of a short story and had us write the story and fill in our own ending. Turns out the short story outline was Nabakov’s “The Leonardo.” As you might expect from a workshop dedicated to speculative fiction writing, many of the stories involved supernatural or otherworldly elements. Mine did not. I set mine in Poland in the 1990s, based off my travel notes from that time and place, and I think the story is a very strong one, though it’s unlike anything I’ve written before or since. It’s also the only story I ever wrote out in longhand. Perhaps if I wrote another story in longhand it would have the same moody literary quality as that one.

Sometimes it can be very challenging to switch to another genre or even another setting. I’ve done it successfully a few times, like when I set the Alternate Susan series and Animal Magic in Tempe, Arizona. I set Parasitic Souls in an imaginary town in Southern California called Clementine. But I have a lot of novels that never got finished, too. I wrote a high fantasy called The Warrior and Her Empress that I abandoned at 110K words back in something like 2003. I started a spinoff with James Melbourne as the main character which was going to be sort of a Canterbury Tales with him as the narrator of a collection of short stories. I quit that at 20K words. I had another one called Prophet of an Indie God about an illiterate messiah in a dystopian future which I quit at like 50K words. Most recently, last year I was working hard on a supernatural thriller set in Philadelphia called Three Hauntings. I loved the characters and their creepy plots, but I got stuck and lost inertia. Who knows, maybe I’ll come back to it? I'm a little bit obsessed with ghost stories these days.

There’s a scene in Alternate Susan when her arm gets possessed and she writes herself a message from her ancestral goddess. In real life, that would be horrifying. I joke that I'm the host organism for a muse, but if my hand ever started writing out a story on its own, I'd be seriously freaked out. Magic and horror is fun--from a distance!