Unbox Your Words 5 Day Hybrid Writing Challenge - Day 0: Introduction
Introduction to the 5-Day Hybrid Writing Challenge, starting tomorrow - and discount code for my next Zoom Workshop!
If you’d like to unlock the full version of this and all future Unbox Your Words posts but the paid option would be a struggle, upgrade for free by clicking this link: https://taniahershman.substack.com/freesub. I’d love to have you as part of our Unbox community! (It may look like it’s taking payment but it will add the 100% discount at the end.)
(Listen to me read this post here)
Hello, lovely people!
The Unbox Your Words 5-Day Hybrid Writing Challenge kicks off tomorrow morning, when you’ll receive Day One’s Writing Prompt, and I thought I’d ease us in gently with a bit of an introduction to what this thing I call “hybrid writing” means to me. Also, as promised, Unbox subscribers, you’ll find your code to get a 20% discount off full-price places on my next Zoom workshop at the bottom of this post!
Ok, on with the hybrid writing…
“I am a little tired of the genre wars, more than a little. Lines between genres have been breaking down for at least half a century, and though I understand an older person being baffled and uncertain (perhaps the world is falling apart?) it surprises me when young people, who were basically born into the postmodern world (which I wasn’t), keep asking questions; I would think they would take the slippage between genres for granted…”
Mary Ruefle, American poet and (surprised) winner of the 2009 Kraus Essay Prize for her collection The Most Of It (Wave Books, 2008)
A few years ago, I ran a 5-day short story writing challenge for Arvon, a UK-based writing organisation, and thought that it would be a good idea not to assume we all know what “short story” might mean, so I started by sharing my thoughts not on what a short story should be but on everything a short story could be. This seems all the more important when we’re talking about something I call “hybrid writing”. What on earth is that?! For me, “hybrid writing” isn’t a new genre or category or label, it’s an unlabelling, it’s – as Mary Ruefle says in the quote above – a slippage between genres and categories. Basically, it’s writing whatever you want to write in the way you want to write it, without worrying about if it has to be a “poem”, “short story”, “essay”, “novel” or one of the many other boxes we so often like to assign collections of words to. If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you might just have heard me saying this before. (OK, yes, probably A LOT.)
The way I see it, “hybrid” might refer to what we’re writing about, the process of writing itself, or the end product – or, of course, some combination of the above! We are going to come at it this week from all these angles, which might feel like a bit of a bombardment, but my hope is that this challenge will help break you out of any boxes you might have slipped into, habits of thinking such as: "I only write epic poems/tiny short stories in the first person/ dark comedy/memoir in verse”, for example. There’s nothing wrong with any of those, of course, but this week is about playing, trying something new.
I recently read Noreen Masud’s wonderful memoir, A Flat Place, which surprised, moved and inspired me. I particular loved her saying “it can be meaningful to focus on the "wrong" details. To make strange relationships with strange things. To allow a scene to blur out of vision, generously.” This spoke to me, seems to fit with my idea of slippage between. I like to think that I make “strange relationships with strange things” - maybe that’s what all writers/artists can give ourselves permission to do. Actually, as I wrote that, I also thought of the scientists and labs I have spent time in, where so many of the researchers are also doing exactly this - and I have no doubt much further afield! I apologise for my shocking slip into “labelling” and compartmentalisation here! Let’s say “maybe that’s what all of us can give ourselves permission to do”.
I also feel it’s important to recognise and acknowledge that moving into these kinds of in-between spaces, places of uncertainty, where nothing is quite one thing or another, can be disorienting and disturbing as well as fascinating, so please do take it slow if you need to. Alongside the tasks I am setting you, you might want to keep a five-day diary of what you're doing/thinking /feeling, noting which tasks really spark your creativity, and which, if any, make you uncomfortable (always an interesting place for a writer to sit in, if it’s not too much). If you’d like to, please do share your thoughts in the comments as the 5-Day challenge proceeds, it would be great to hear how you are finding it, what is coming up, through, out and around for you.
This week is about you coming up with your own unique take on hybrid writing. However, there are a few well-known examples of hybrids you may have heard of: the prose poem, for example, which is the love child of prose and poetry (whatever that might mean); the lyric essay (a sort of mash-up of poetry and essay); and autofiction, which is a melding of autobiography and fiction. I would gently encourage you to move away from needing a hard and fast definition of anything. But something you might notice from these three examples is that they all seem to be formed from one thing colliding with something else. As I mentioned in my newsletter, I am a huge fan of collisions and mash-ups (in my next Zoom workshop we’ll be doing just this) – this challenge might have been called “Let’s Collide!” By the way, this doesn’t have to be just about words – feel free to throw in some images or something else, too. Collide it all!
The main theme of this week is: Play! Get curious about your own writing processes (there isn’t one that all writers have in common, everyone does it differently – I myself have several/many writing processes that I use at different times), and try and ignore any inner critics that might pop up to tell you what you’re writing “doesn’t make sense”. Don’t worry about making sense. In my opinion, that’s over-rated.
I was a little reluctant to include examples of hybrid pieces, because I don’t want anyone to feel they need to follow some kind of “hybrid writing template”, but I also do want to whet your appetite with what a hybrid piece might be, so here are a few of my favourites, of different lengths and styles, because really nothing is a better writing teacher than reading to give yourself permission to go for it! Day 1 of the 5 Day Hybrid Writing Challenge will wing its way to you tomorrow morning - happy reading/writing/experimenting!
Tania
To Read, If You’d Like
You Are What You Eat What You Have What You’re Given That You Take and Try to Make Better by Kathryn Silver-Hajo, (Issue 5, Literary Ruby - scroll down) https://rubyliterarypress.com/issue-five-issue-five-food-stories/
My Wolf Sister by Matthea Harvey https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147476/my-wolf-sister
The Bench by Mary Ruefle https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54119/the-bench
Q: Does This Pie Travel Well by Alyson Mosquera Dutemple http://thediagram.com/22_4/dutemple.html
Names Strangers Have Called Me by Ames Varos https://thediagram.com/22_2/varos.html
Borges and I by By Jorge Luis Borges https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/borg&i.htm