Have you ever dabbled in more than one genre in your writing life? Maybe you have a children’s book on the back burner while you finish wrestling the first draft of your novel over the finish line? Or perhaps you turned to poetry when your second draft of a non-fiction project fell flat?
Throughout my 25-year writing life, I’ve similarly experimented with different forms – sometimes for the same writing project – in order that I can find the right bed to lay my story down on.
My twenties…
I started out writing poetry while still at university in the early days of the Warwick Writing Programme, as a teenager. A subsequent masters in Creative Writing sapped my confidence in poetry; I turned to prose.
During my early twenties, I experimented with writing a novel set in New York and Venice; I took field trips to both USA and Italy for several months to research this project which still hasn’t (yet) seen the light of day but I think that’s about to change.
I then turned to life writing and wrote 80,000 words of a memoir when I was aged 24. I felt an urgency to capture the point of view of a child before I had children myself – which turned out to be just as well, because less than three years later I was pregnant with my first child.
Meanwhile, I was starting out in my career in publishing which involved attending the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was during a debrief over coffee with the publisher at Oldcastle Books, for whom I was selling Eastern European rights at the time, that they asked how my writing career was going.
“I’d love to write a book about Lou Andreas Salome,” I responded, “But I don’t feel I have the credentials to be her biographer.”
“What about her interests you?” he asked.
“She was connected to Nietzsche, Freud and was muse to Rainer Maria Rilke,” I replied. “I guess I could write about the concept of muses…”
“If you write me a proposal and if I like it, I’ll publish it.”
Two years later, and Muses: Revealing the Nature of Inspiration was published, one week after my daughter was born. A work of non-fiction, it examined the idea of musedom through the lens of different relationships between artists and their fellow inspirers.
A friend at the time said this book would be like a business card; proof that I could write well, to deadline and find a readership. A write-up in the Daily Express helped to boost its reach, and it was stocked in national art galleries across the UK. She turned out to be right.
My thirties…
When my two kids were pre-school, I moved to Wales and shortly after applied for a modest Literature Wales bursary to help pay for nursery fees of £1,000 across six months. In the process of completing the application form, I turned to my hard drive to dig out a project I felt I could deliver within the funding period.
Languishing in an archive was the memoir I’d written. Another friend, who then worked for HarperCollins read the initial draft and had given me the priceless feedback that, while it was well written, nothing really happened and nobody knew who I was so nobody would care. At the time, it had hit the right mark. I knew she was right and appreciated her honesty.
But what if I fictionalised it, and used this memoir content as a jumping off point for a novel?
This became my second book, a work of auto-fiction, What a Way to Go which was published by Atlantic Books and WF Howes in audio format in 2016.
Having written one up-market ‘women’s’ work of fiction, I spent the next 18 months trying to replicate the formula while writing full time, only to discover that the full-time writing regime really didn’t suit my personality and nor did the genre. It was one of the hardest lessons of my writing career to date to accept that I was not a ‘strategic’ writer who could write out of a similar seam.
Self-knowledge, it became clear, was instrumental to progression and so was getting out of my comfort zone.
My forties…
And so, I tentatively returned to my roots, and to writing poetry. Joining a local Stanza poetry feedback group in 2017, I began to write new material. An essay in the 2018 edition of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook by Neil Astley on how to write a poetry collection was crucial to me understanding that this was a long haul: five years of development, at least. In fact, it took me seven years to complete the manuscript of Invisible Sisterhood which is now out on submission.
And so, as 2025 comes round, it is no surprise that I’m crossing the genre-streams yet again and return to the form of memoir, at the age of 46 in the hope that by the time I reach my fifth decade I’ll have been able to complete a full-length project in a fourth genre. And maybe return to the material I amassed twenty years ago on those field trips I took in America and Italy, writing up the material from the perspective of mid-Wales.
I have learnt that content dictates the form. Try as I might, I could never force what wanted to be a poem into the container of a chapter of prose, or vice versa. Accepting this takes courage as dominant cultural narratives would suggest that in order to succeed we need to plough the same furrow over and over. But I’m a believer that we can always give ourselves permission to experiment as artists.
This belief underpins why I have created the Writers’ Cabin and formed an author coaching service from my base here in mid-Wales…
The Writers’ Cabin is a place to dare to dream, to read, to relax and to be inspired, no matter the genre. The natural environment here enables writers to let go of external pressure to perform and to melt into the view which overlooks the Tarren mountain range, one which today is blanketed in snow. Writers come here to haul their PhD theses over the finish lines, to walk in nature, to read in bed and to take time to experiment with their works-in-progress.
My service to writers as an author coach meanwhile is to be curious about writers’ professional lives – not only when it comes to the genre they are writing in, but also to the structure which underpins their writing life. As a coach, I use myself as an instrument, much as I do in my writing life, and I observe deeply in order to help clients to unlock their unique creative breakthroughs.
If you think you might be interested to find out more about my author coaching services or writer’s retreats in the Cabin, visit Write Within to find out more.
