Having published books of both fiction and poetry, Victoria Redel (above) and I are often asked how we differentiate between genres at the creative stage.
Terese Svoboda:
The beast presents itself, an image or a pre-occupation. Wrestling it into reasonableness sometimes results in abortions, monsters, and ephemera. Once I dreamt about a wild child hiding in amongst a herd of cattle. The dream kept returning. Not only the visual image, or in her case, the lack of one, drew me back, but the situation: how could she remain invisible? Did she exist or was she just some suppressed emotion? In contradiction to the injunction to write what you know, the most compelling subjects are more likely what you don't know, or what you know too little about. I wrote a poem about the dream which turned into a short story which slowly freed itself into a novella and ended, transformed, as a night of dance. Only the novella was published. Sometimes I'm a better craftsperson in one genre than another, or the subject is. Always I learn something about what I'm writing about when it's recast.
Victoria Redel:
Aside from being long or short, I can't always tell what I'm making. If the subject keeps drawing me back, it gets longer, either stanza-wise or across the page. If the lines offer a rhythm or a rhyme that I could revise around, that may be the start of a formal schema. If someone starts talking in what I'm writing, I wonder if it's a monologue and try interrogating to see if it's a dialogue. If it's a dialogue, then there's conflict and setting. Only poets get away with free-floating language.
Is one genre easier? Is one preferable?
Victoria Redel:
Those are questions I’m asked all the time. I’m guessing you are too, Terese. The simple answer is no and no, but let me unpack what that means. Like you, I started as a poet and despite having now published more books of fiction (5) than poetry(3), I still primarily think of myself as a poet. Maybe what that means is that I’m always thinking about language, how each word, each sentence shapes the whole. I’m interested in the shape of a work and that it’s my material, the actual placement of words, that create the arc and the architecture. I love syntax. I love the inherent music in syntax. In a poem, I’ve always loved the drive of the long sentence, the opportunity within a sentence to create layering of idea, of imagery, of implication. Conversely the pulled back, restrained sentence has an inherent of mystery. Also I've built on the way I build the moment in the poem, to shape how I build scenes. It's probably no surprise that all three novels have a collaged, layered narrative aspect.
But wait, I’m straying from your question and the answer. Another way to answer the original question is that whatever I’m not currently writing is what seems easier and preferable. In the thick middle of a novel, I start longing for the beauty of the poem, the way a single poem can be held on a page, held in my mind, memorized. I find myself announcing to friends how much I’m longing to finish the novel and start writing poems. But then heading back into poems, I’m back to beginner mind. What’s a poem? What can I do inside a poem that could matter? What interests me? And the poem feels so rigorous.
But to throw another complication in the mix—in many ways I feel the most rigorous form I work in is the short story. And when I get a story right, there is such intense pleasure in having managed the sustained intensity and world making demanded in the short story. It has it's own mathematics. How about you?
Terese Svoboda:
No genre is easy. Poetry is impossible, but it's short and thus enticing. Who doesn't want to be a magician and pull something so alive out of a hat? If it's good it looks easy. Poetry does without the labor of characters and plot, although one could say dealing graphically with the white space is as formidable an element as either of those. Besides, there's the intoxication of words, the writer's fist love, and all their cryptic connotations, getting them lined up to evoke meaning together, or subterfuge. Although I hate to say it, my love of, and scrutiny for words puts me closest to lawyers.
I laughed, rueful, reading about your longing for poetry when you're writing prose and vice versa. The grass is always greener – for a while. Then you're out chewing on the same stuff, sure ease, profundity, brilliance just a genre away. Like maybe writing an essay? I've written biography, (particularly bad) screen plays, librettos, plays, reviews, music videos, introductions, afterwords, biography, lectures, memoir as well as novels, stories and poems. My hair is thin from all the pulling out, why, it's turned white! I've been going through my papers and it's shocking what I've resorted to, needing money or just challenge.
Perhaps the question I've posed – what genre is easier or preferable – never gets answered because as poets, we are always hoping to renew language, and genre is a construct, something every ambitious writer plans to renew, and oops! finds difficult at every turn.
All genre provide pain. But writers do have proclivities, expertise in plot or a drive to rhyme. What's easy isn't necessarily the best. I hate writing that. I've read belabored work, I've written it. But sometimes – more seldom than sometimes – it is easy. It falls onto the page, the rabbit leaps from the hat, and all you have to do is arrange it. Hopefully, you have the tools to know how. The only way to get that experience is to try writing a poem or a novel or a story or a libretto. I like having a lot of tools.
With a short story, I write myself into a corner, and that's the point. It's not like a novel that takes the reader by the hair and drags him through. A short story flirts and betrays and well, does it, and you're lying there, panting. But that's true of a poem as well. You have to write fast and rewrite slow.
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