Changing My Personality on Command to Write Different Genres
Costume change!
Malleable Me
I had no idea it would be so easy. Like removing one costume and putting on another, I became a different person just like that. Again and again.
From an Early Age
Growing up, I wanted to be like William Faulker. When other girls had posters of David Cassidy, I had Faulker on my locker. I loved his audacity with multiple POV characters. He was shaking it up. He was piercing the veil of consciousness and perception while honoring humble, quirky country people.
My parents gave into my passion, and we visited his old house in Mississippi, which was closed when we got there, a tragedy. I imagined our land, blessed with eccentric relatives who homesteaded and built their own houses on Sand Mountain in rural Alabama, would one day be visited by fans of my novels, with my own brand of experimentalism, about similar folk to his Yoknapatawpha denizens. I took to wearing old-fashioned sun bonnets. My characters swept the sand in their yard and washed clothes at the river with rocks, just like Mama did.
Experimentation Rocks
Experimentation became increasingly important to me the more trips I went on to see Modern Art at the museum and when I watched an artistic documentary film in our high school auditorium about Merce Cunningham’s dance troupe purposely dancing out of step to John Cage’s industrial music around Rauschenberg Big Glass sculpture. I thought of running away to dance out of step to the sound of breaking glass. I was never really in step with pop culture, anyway.
I still read the Romantics like Wordsworth and enthusiastically attended the Romantic Festival for Beethovan and his ilk with Mama, but I was becoming strange. She didn’t like my poems anymore. Writing about an Alabama Baptist family that would never be OK with my work, which surely Breton would have deemed worthy of entry into his Surrealist club, seemed pointless. I started walking alone along the creek at midnight night, singing, barefoot, with no flashlight. When strangers called for me on the phone, Mama told them that in muffled tones.
I read Rimbaud’s commandment that we should derange the senses. I was pristine and didn’t even consider that he meant to use drugs; I used will power as I dissociated while lying on a cot in the family storage room, feeling transitory while my dying Grandma withered in my bedroom.
When I married a poet, I became a poet only, giving up on fiction, while we were busy happily reading Norman Dubie and James Tate to each other, editing our work together in bed, our fun times consisting of used book stores, poetry receptions and MLA conventions. Touring poets stayed with us. I imprinted on the goal of being on a panel as the benchmark of success. My little biography impressively filled with awards. I felt that being married sheltered me from living enough to be truly a great writer and writing teacher.
Adventure Leads to Fiction
When we divorced, my life became unquestioningly fiction-worthy, full of adventure and I lived uncompromising, avoiding the default ideas of shelter, avoiding expectations of normal behavior, pushing the limits of what a human could endure and achieve. My Literary stories were published everywhere, and when I was eventually hired to teach experimental fiction online, I took that on as my identity. I was the Queen of Innovation. I made a massive resource site about that type of writing and published many people’s work. I achieved my goal of being on panels, such as at the &Now Festival of New Writing. It was great fun.
And then it wasn’t. No longer were writers like Barthelme, Cortazar, Barth and the other Post-Modernists the cutting edge rock stars. Neither were visiting poets the big draw at universities. People no longer were paying good money to buy Literary fiction and avant-garde poetry that pushed the limits. Socializing became isolating because the writers I knew all had a different world-view from me. The movies I loved were all foreign art films by Parajanov, Jodorowsky, Madden, Deren, The Brothers Quay and Svankmajer. But they danced out of step with popular culture everyone else valued. It was time to become a different person.
Time to Get with the Program
I’d been hired to teach various classes about Short Story writing, anyway, which meant I wanted to know how to write every genre well and understand all the conventions. I decided to stop enjoying non-linear movies with no discernible plot, labyrinthine Literary stories and poetry that approached mystical experience. I decided, with determined trepidation, that I would leave that all behind and become the kind of person who actually liked popular genre movies and best-selling Thrillers and did normal stuff. I wanted to write something that sold to a big audience and would prompt them to question default assumptions about society, such as American exceptionalism: I did still have ambitions of shaking things up.
Becoming Genre-Girl
With Genre novels, I wanted to prove to students and editing clients that I knew what I was talking about. I wanted to make money so I could keep living indoors in a beige box like everyone else. I wanted to understand the majority of people, who either don’t know what Literary fiction is or hate it and make fun of everyone who writes it.
And so I did.
It actually worked. I was amazed. I analyzed popular films and paused movies online at various moments to test myself on formula. I’ll bet it’s exactly 3/5th of the way into it, if that action is happening now. I never again picked up a copy of Literary fiction voluntarily. Little Free Libraries around the neighborhood offered me delicious Suspense and Romance. My brain literally worked completely differently. I had succeeded in becoming a different person entirely.
When I wrote my novels, I kept changing them to fit the genre of the day. Analytics of Amazon drove my reality. My Dystopian draft was revised when I read that Dystopian literature no longer was selling. I forget what I made it into next, as that also went out of style, and was just one link in the chain of rewrites. I eventually settled on Psychological Suspense and stuck with it, but each book that I wrote (and there are some I have yet to release) has a different subgenre.
I cover it all. I am everyone popular. I am no one not popular. I am somewhat like everyone else. I never experiment. I do what I am told. I follow the formula. You can pause me at 3/5th of the way into my day, and it’s exactly what you’d expect.
And I have to say, I totally enjoy that. I love literary formula that moves my readers to tears, laughter and thrills. I’m glad I’ve experimented with not being experimental. I like that I’ve bonded with humanity.
Now, buy my books.
