“Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them. Writing is still the wildest thing I know.”
—NATALIE GOLDBERG, FROM WILD MIND: LIVING THE WRITER’S LIFE
For those who have trepidation about the craft of writing, there are many answers, formulas, courses, books, and paths already laid down for you. But the known path is not the one artists tread. The work you do that ventures somewhere new, crosses new divides, and bears your singular mark may not be anywhere near those tried-and-true variables already in place.
Real art pushes outside of comfortable zones and introduces new vision. It falls “outside the box.”
“The Box,” of course, changes all the time. Every few years, new trends, new methods, and new approaches crop up and start running the show, and since the onset of digital publishing, I’d say these trends and methods are changing faster than ever. Sometimes writing that no one would publish a decade ago is now the hot new ticket. But the fact is, if you try to write to trends or popularity, you run the risk of driving yourself crazy.
And yet, you have inspired stories to tell. You have a distinctive viewpoint. You come with experiences remarkable to you. Those things don’t always fit the mold. It’s easy to feel as though there’s only one way and that veering off the beaten path will lead to failure. False! By now I hope I’ve driven home that there is no such thing as failure in a writing practice. There is quitting; there are experiments that yield new fruit; there are experiments that prove to be dead-ends. But you don’t fail by trying new things. You don’t fail by looking outside the box. In fact, outside the box is the realm of wild and innovative success. Just at the edges of what’s accepted lies new information, new ways of seeing.
“The Box” may not be what’s popular but a space you’ve drawn to limit yourself. It’s a box that says, “I can’t write that,” or “I’m a novelist; I can’t write memoir.” Keeping yourself within a box may be your way of unwittingly holding back from something you really want to write, that could stretch you or even be your perfect medium. I recall hearing Neil Gaiman speak at San Jose State University several years ago. He was about to read from his wildly anticipated novel The Graveyard Book. He said that he kept waiting to be a talented-enough writer to write the story. Every few years he would try to write it and say, “No, I’m not there yet.” And then, one day, he realized he would never be as talented as he wanted to be to write it, and he just had to write it anyway.
Take Gaiman’s advice: Write it anyway.
So what to do about these boxes and their notoriously prohibitive qualities? First, of course, you have to admit that the box is an obstacle. Doing so helps you identify it. For example, say you are a literary writer in terms of style, and you love to write plot. Maybe you’d like to delve into writing plot-driven fiction, but you fear that you won’t be any good at it or that literary writers “just don’t write those kinds of novels.”
In fact, for years, plot-driven novels that were also considered literary works weren’t a “thing” in the realm of fiction. You either wrote literature or you wrote genre work. And then, somewhere along the way, literary writers like Justin Cronin and Benjamin Percy started turning their keen sensibilities toward the telling of ripping good yarns. Now the literary thriller, the literary vampire novel, and a whole other host of literary crossover writing is not only accepted but sells quite well.
If you find yourself doubting that you can write cross-genre work, take some time to investigate what’s already out there and see if you can’t find a writer to emulate in terms of the risks or crossover they’ve made. Or maybe in reading this chapter you’ve had an aha moment and realized that you don’t write straight out of an existing mold. If that’s the case, embrace that epiphany and break new ground.
In addition to recognizing and admitting that the box is an obstacle to your forward success, you must also ask yourself what you’re yearning to write but don’t feel permission to write. Are you boxing yourself in because of one of the fears we discussed in an earlier chapter? Are you holding yourself back because of internal taboos? Go back and reread those chapters to work through your fears and hang-ups. Often you’ve kept yourself inside the box simply because it’s accepted as the common denominator, the preference of the masses. It’s all that you know.
But what else would you like to write? How else would you like to go about it? What would you write if there were no restrictions—internal or external? One of the most transformative writers I read in graduate school was Italo Calvino, an Italian surrealist whose writing is a hybrid of short story and prose poetry. His words paint visuals that linger in the mind. Are there plots and character arcs? Not that I can find. These stories don’t lend themselves to literal interpretation, but much like dreams, they provide an impressionistic, even hallucinatory, series of images you can add up any way your mind perceives. My favorite of Calvino’s books is Invisible Cities, the story of the historical figure Marco Polo on his journeys, in conversation with the Emperor Kublai Khan. His journeys take him through magic “cities,” each different and fantastical, and a metaphor for some aspect of Polo’s journey.
You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are. Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer’s house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales, the grocer’s. Statues and shields depict lions, dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something—who knows what—has as its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star.
I have no doubt that if Calvino had tried to write inside only one box, he’d have been a bored, repressed writer.
Be honest with yourself, especially if you’re feeling confined, bored, or constricted by existing “trends” and “niches.” You don’t have to share any of your experiments outside the box, but there’s creative value in allowing yourself to venture into these places.
Here is the conundrum of great writing: If you write only with the market or audience in mind, you run the risk of producing formulaic, derivative work. If you never think about your market or audience, then you may have a steeper uphill climb when it comes time to publish. But I like to think there is an in-between space called WriterLand, an alchemist’s workshop where ideas hatch and mingle and form chimeras of form and genre. It’s the place of creation where you don’t need to worry about any boxes, because they don’t exist. The writing process at its wildest is one of unlimited potential. You begin to limit your visions the moment you start writing them down, but you limit them the most when you start worrying about who’s watching, listening, and so on.
So eventually, yes, you can worry about the markets, but while you’re in your mad-scientist lab, let loose—leap past boundaries and constrictions and write from a wild place. You may not know what these wild excursions will produce that can be applied to later work, too. Just as repetitive motions can cause injury in the body, I believe that too much repetition of material or form can cause a writer’s muse to stagnate.
As your voice forms cohesion and you settle into a clear idea of what you love to write and how this best suits your needs as a writer, you may at first think that a niche doesn’t exist for your work. The mainstream bookshelves are getting ever narrower. For instance, I know plenty of female writers who write about women, family, domestic life, and sex but feel no communion with women’s fiction, chick-lit, or erotica in any of its forms. You have to look beyond the top layer. The biggest publishers will go with the most reliable forms, those that take the fewest risks and hew the closest to formulas. But there is an entire counterculture of literature produced by small presses, hybrid presses, literary councils, university presses, author’s collectives, and so on. And for every area of human interest, there are people who want to read about it. You can’t rely upon existing forms to provide you with the path to these places. You have to discover it. You need to do some research, and along the way you may find an entire world of people and subjects opens up to you.
From fan fiction to Bigfoot erotica (not making that one up!) to LGBT literature and literature of social change, “There are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” as Shakespeare wrote. Sometimes going outside the box means going beyond your own understanding and learning more about options and opportunities that were previously unknown to you. And like the bewildered and sometimes terrified hero in any good story, you may experience tremors of fear, but they are worth pushing past.
Research something that has always interested you with the goal of bringing it into something you’re working on or using it as a prompt for a new piece of writing. Watch a documentary, hole up in a library carrel with an encyclopedia or a biography, read interviews of authors you’re unfamiliar with, or research photographs that fascinate you. The topics, words, and media that hold your rapt attention often make for compelling writing.
by Heather Fowler, author of Elegantly Naked in my Sexy Mental Illness and three other books
What’s really strange about moving outside “the Box” is that I never even knew what the main writer’s box looked like until long after I’d attained two degrees. In college, most creative writing workshops stressed the mastering of short fiction. Workshopping a novel was discouraged. Stories were revered. Naturally I thought it was okay, and, in fact, not a bad idea, to write tons and tons of short stories.
My form considerations were also influenced by a busy lifestyle. As a parent with a full-time job, shorter works were easier to undertake than novels. They fit my tiny writing windows. I wrote several hundred and published many. Nonetheless, several years later, without a published book to my name, in conversation with other writer friends, I realized that a novel would give me better traction for both money and greater field visibility. So, Yes, yes, a novel, I thought. No more stories.
I am embarrassed to admit that once I accepted this idea—a novel or bust—my writing stopped. Feeling uninspired and defeated, I couldn’t seem to do it anymore.
The box and its outlines got very clear then: To get an agent and be seen, what I really needed was exactly the thing I could not entice myself to write. As a result, I lost faith in the endeavor of being a writer and devalued my own stories. I’d been clearly told by colleagues that only the novel mattered—because, unless I published in The New Yorker, honey, stories didn’t count anywhere, and they “weren’t what readers wanted.” I was also told that stories, while great for agent-hunt bio building, were largely irrelevant for earning advances. Story collections weren’t seen as viable books unless they included contest winners, and they were definitely harder to sell.
I wanted to die that year. In privacy. Preferably while cursing loudly.
Luckily, common sense soon returned. There is not just one path, I reminded myself, and I lit that novels-only box on fire, deciding that I wanted to write stories because I enjoyed writing stories, so I would first do that—and then I would put them on the market! I would send them out as collections, Novel Box be damned, because I was only languishing when I didn’t work on or believe in what I wanted to write. No one profited if I stopped writing altogether, and I had to go my own way.
When I did this with my whole heart, soon enough, a story collection was accepted—this after more than a decade with no book. Within five years of actively championing my short work, I had four story collections accepted by three publishers—all this before acquiring an agent. Incidentally, once the pressure left, I wrote that novel, too. And the funny thing was, despite their supposed purpose in the agent hunt, my stories helped me secure my current agent—but this had nothing to do with “the Box” or the venue in which my stories appeared. It had everything to do with my agent taking a chance on my novel because she had faith in my short work.
That said, my message now to aspiring writers is simple: Know what the Box is supposed to be, yes, but move toward what moves you regardless. Write what’s necessary to your voice as an author, and the shape of your career will feel both urgent and poignant, will emerge almost without conscious intervention. Boxless for years now, I currently find myself amazed by the directions in which the artistic impulse has taken me—and I’m grateful.
I did not anticipate these books, these stories, that arrived like pilgrims at my door. They asked only that I listen, caretake, and record.
I also had no idea, starting out as an experimental feminist literary author, that life would take my book path to magical realism first, then dystopia, then mental-illness fiction, and then ghosts, carting along poetry all the while. But my books chose me when I chose them.
I get out of their way now. I do what they say.
I no longer see a box but instead a series of doors. Whichever is most charming in any given moment is the door I crack.