WRITE-BYTES BLOG

WRITE-BYTES BLOG
…a resource for writers 
May 12, 2023
By Linda S. Gunther
The topic this week - 
SHIFTING GENRES

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www.lindasgunther.com
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Write-Bytes this week: 
May 12, 2023
SHIFTING GENRES
Maybe you’ve been writing memoir and you’re thinking about trying another genre. When I started writing seriously, I began with romantic suspense. Novel after novel poured out of me. Plots, characters, settings, twists – the whole nine yards. I couldn’t stop inventing, creating intense situations for my protagonists to deal with, often a combination of emotional relationship problems and threatening physical circumstances. 

But one day a few years ago I stepped out of my comfort zone and wrote a short memoir piece about something from way back in my past. I had spent two months in 1987 studying portrait photography in the Soviet Union with proteges of Ansel Adams. Our group of about twenty students, through a San Francisco State University program, traveled to six different Soviet cities where we learned from and worked with incredible Russian photo journalists and portrait photographers, immersed in the brewing cultural tensions of that time. As we visited each city, we listened to the concerns of the people we met, many of them in the artistic community and we were even placed in the middle of a stressful scenario involving the KGB. The personal essay I wrote about my experience was titled Leningrad 1987.

I read the story I wrote to my writing critique group who were supportive of my piece. “Write more about your real life,” my writing coach recommended. For some reason, the prospect of focusing on memoir felt uncomfortable to me.  But just two weeks later, I was invited to “open mic” night at a local pub in Santa Cruz (Northern California) and was invited to read my Leningrad 1987 story aloud to a Friday night audience. My writing coach at that time had arranged it and so he was there to cheer me on along with several of my writing colleagues. I was nervous as hell. But once I got started, I relaxed into it once I looked up at the engaged faces in the crowd. Numerous people came up to me after the reading, many I had never met before, some of them college students and an array of people who lived locally. They thanked me for the interesting content and asked me more questions about my time in Russia. And so that wonderful night at a pub in Santa Cruz in 2016, I more seriously began to consider the possibility of writing more about my personal experiences. But instead of diving further into memoir, I wrote a fourth suspense novel, then a fifth, and then my sixth, most recent novel, Death Is A Great Disguiser set in mostly in Santa Cruz County and partially in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Flash forward to 2021, years after having written the personal essay piece about the Soviet Union. I decided to venture back to memoir. I was in another weekly writers’ critique group but I hadn’t come up with a concept yet for suspense novel #7. Ideas and concepts for new stories and characters were marinating in my head. So, what the heck, I thought, I’ll write a piece about growing up in the Bronx in New York City.

I jumped in, and proceeded to write more than fifteen Bronx stories, transitioning from an exclusive focus on romantic suspense to adding memoir to the mix, and am currently knitting together a collection of stories about coming of age in the Bronx during the 1960’s.

Although I am excited about shifting genres, I continue to craft short stories in the suspense genre while in the midst of writing memoir. I like having that writing flexibility, enjoy the expanded horizon.

Because I had the guts to get out of my comfort zone and play around in memoir, I think I’ve grown by leaps and bounds as a writer. More skills result in more possibilities. I have also forayed into writing a bit of poetry, some of that work published. But I realize that I’m just not that excited about writing poetry. I am enthralled with writing suspense, romance and now memoir. And, I also generate the WRITE-BYTES blog which is yet another genre for me. Doing research on topics of interest to writers and then blending that content with what I’ve learned along the way as an author helps me craft blog posts which hopefully benefit other writers.

Crossing genres takes bravery because at first it feels awkward. But little by little, you grow your skills in the new genre, and then can decide whether it’s really for you or not. Whatever your decision, you get the opportunity to spread your wings and fly in a new airspace! What could be more delicious for a writer.

Highlights in bold italic above capture the core of this blog post!

Stay tuned for next week. Look for this BLOG every FRIDAY which will l be posted at 9 a.m.

Next week’s WRITE-BYTES post will be titled CHRONOLOGY AND THE WRITER

Linda S. Gunther has written six romantic suspense novels: Ten Steps From The Hotel Inglaterra, Endangered Witness, Lost In The Wake, Finding Sandy Stonemeyer, Dream Beach, and most recently published, Death Is A Great Disguiser. Ms. Gunther’s short stories and essays have been published in several literary journals.