Hybrid Writing

If you’ve read my latest free post on Writing Talk Cold Flannels and One-Liners, you’ll know I spent the last month suffering from a bout of shingles, which meant work and creativity, including Substack, had to take a backseat.

When my body felt well enough to start working again, my brain lagged behind. Everything felt a little grey and ragged at the edges. I needed something fresh and different to juice me up again.

What worked was a prescription of Hybrid Writing. I recently did a couple of sessions on this form with the writing group I lead, and it was good medicine for my jaded creative mind. And, turns out, it’s more prevalent than you might think. Take a look at this brief list:

• Prose poetry (as the name suggests, a blend of prose and poetry, for example haibun)

• Non-fiction narratives (a mashup of poetry, fiction and essay)

• Autofiction (a mix of autobiography and fiction)

• Structural Hybrids (Ranging from an epistolary novel to hermit crab flash fiction – very short stories written using a different format. For example a story about relationship conveyed in the language and structure of an instruction manual).

• Fiction and other medium blends (graphic or art elements, maybe even music or soundscapes, or animation…)

You might call hybrid writing a mash-up of different genres and forms. But really, it’s not about a concrete definition. It’s about shaking off categorisation and playing in the sandbox of possibility.

You might be a flash fiction writer, or a short story author or a novelist or screenwriter, and very much enjoy the boundaries of those forms. But you don’t always have to be that writer. It can be liberating to play with the possibilities of bending and reshaping and being playful. That can feed back into your creativity.

Author and Substack writer Tania Hershman, who is a leading light in hybrid writing says this:

For me, hybrid writing isn’t a new genre or category or label, it’s an unlabelling…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 whether 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. 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!

Whether you write poetry, memoir, fantasy, romance, literary fiction or screenplays, there’s nothing stopping you, and plenty to be gained, from breaking out of those restraints (useful as they are) to be playful and daring. Yes, it can be discomforting but that’s good. Yes it can be seem alien. Also good. Freeing yourself up and doing something different creatively is a way not only to open yourself up to new possibilities, but also a way to strengthen the work already you do within the confines of form and genre.

I’ve created three simple hybrid writing exercises and a list of recommended reading of some amazing hybrid writing in the section below for my Paid Subscribers.