5-Day Hybrid Writing Challenge Prompts
5-Day Challenge Introduction: What Might Hybrid Writing Be?
“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 and thought that it would be a good idea not to assume we all know what “short story” means, so I started by sharing my thoughts 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 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! 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 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).
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. I am a huge fan of collisions – 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 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 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! Happy writing!
Tania
Suggested Reading
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 (has image and text)
https://thediagram.com/22_2/varos.html
Borges and I by Jorge Luis Borges
https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/borg&i.htm
Red by Jesse Lee Kercheval
Day 1: Let’s Get Hybrid
The question for our first day is: how do you get going? My philosophy has always been that you never need to start from the blank page, and I am going to set you a two-part task to get some words down.
Our theme for today is to look at the idea of hybrids in nature – and in ourselves! Below you’ll find some excerpts from various articles, with links if you’d like to read more about each or all of them. Just to say that this is pretty weird territory we are stepping into here, which, as I mentioned in the introduction, might make you uncomfortable, so take it slowly and don’t feel you have to read everything in one go.
Task 1
What I’d like you to do first is to take notes while you are reading some or all of the texts below. Write down anything you like in these notes – words or phrases that jump out at you, ideas that come up as you read, thoughts about how you yourself might be hybrid, doodles, anything at all. These notes are for you, don’t rein yourself in, and feel free to google anything that piques your interest here, follow it further, and take notes on whatever rabbit holes you find yourself falling down.
Task 2
When you’ve got to a point where you feel like you want to stop, and you’ve gone off and had a cup of tea/coffee/other beverage etc.., what I’d now like you to do is look back at your notes and turn them into a numbered list with at least 10 entries on your list. An entry might be one word, a whole paragraph, anything you like. Start getting playful here, anything goes at all, enjoy yourself! You might want to give your list a title. You might want to do all sorts of things. Go for it!
“More than half your body is not human”, BBC, 10 April 2018
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-43674270
More than half of your body is not human, say scientists. Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists. Understanding this hidden half of ourselves – our microbiome – is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s. The field is even asking questions of what it means to be “human” and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result. “They are essential to your health,” says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, “your body isn’t just you”.
No matter how well you wash, nearly every nook and cranny of your body is covered in microscopic creatures. This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria). The greatest concentration of this microscopic life is in the dark murky depths of our oxygen-deprived bowels. Prof Rob Knight, from University of California San Diego, told the BBC: “You’re more microbe than you are human.”
Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one. “That’s been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you’re about 43% human if you’re counting up all the cells,” he says. But genetically we’re even more outgunned. The human genome – the full set of genetic instructions for a human being – is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes. But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes….
Hybrid animals
A zebroid is the offspring of any cross between a zebra and any other equine; examples include: zorse, zebrule, zonkey, zebonkey, zony. The liger is a hybrid cross between a male lion (Panthera leo) and a tigress (Panthera tigris). Thus, it has parents with the same genus but of different species. It is distinct from the similar hybrid tiglon. It is the largest of all known extant felines. Ligers enjoy swimming, which is a characteristic of tigers, and are very sociable like lions. Ligers exist only in captivity because the habitats of the parental species do not overlap in the wild. Historically, when the Asiatic Lion was prolific, the territories of lions and tigers did overlap and there are legends of ligers existing in the wild. Notably, ligers typically grow larger than either parent species, unlike tiglons which tend to be about as large as a female tiger.
Pizzly bears, also known as grolar bears and nanulaks, are a cross between a polar bear and a grizzly bear. Although polars and grizzlies are genetically similar, they tend to avoid each other in the wild. Grizzlies tend to live and breed on land and polar bears tend to live on the ice and hunt in water. But theories suggest some polar bears may have increasingly moved south from the arctic due to global warming reducing its icy habitat. DNA testing on a suspected pizzly in 2006 confirmed that it was the result of cross breeding. Pizzlies have cream-coloured fur like polars, but grizzly traits like long claws and brown patches.
“Human Chimeras That Already Exist,” Scientific American, Aug 2016
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-that-already-exist/
A chimera is essentially a single organism that’s made up of cells from two or more “individuals”—that is, it contains two sets of DNA, with the code to make two separate organisms. One way that chimeras can happen naturally in humans is that a foetus can absorb its twin. This can occur with fraternal twins, if one embryo dies very early in pregnancy, and some of its cells are “absorbed” by the other twin. The remaining foetus will have two sets of cells: its own original set, plus the one from its twin. These individuals often don’t know they are a chimera. For example, in 2002, news outlets reported the story of a woman named Karen Keegan, who needed a kidney transplant and underwent genetic testing along with her family, to see if a family member could donate one to her. But the tests suggested that genetically, Keegan could not be the mother of her sons. The mystery was solved when doctors discovered that Keegan was a chimera—she had a different set of DNA in her blood cells compared to the other tissues in her body.
A person can also be a chimera if they undergo a bone marrow transplant. During such transplants, which can be used for example to treat leukaemia, a person will have their own bone marrow destroyed and replaced with bone marrow from another person. Bone marrow contains stem cells that develop into red blood cells. This means that a person with a bone marrow transplant will have blood cells, for the rest of their life, which are genetically identical to those of the donor, and are not genetically the same as the other cells in their own body.
Day 2: Interview with a Hybrid
Now that you’ve begun to slip into hybrid spaces and ideas, it’s time to talk to someone. Who are you going to talk to? You’re going to chat to a hybrid creature that you’ve created. Let your imagination off the leash here and think up a hybrid creature that brings together two (or more) things that wouldn’t normally be found, for example a cat/coffee-machine hybrid (something I long for in the mornings), an opera-singing oxbow lake or an oak tree who is the local chief of police.
When you have a hybrid creature in mind, give it a name. That’s the polite thing to do. Then I’d like you to interview it. Ask it at least five questions and answer those questions in the voice of your newly created creature, so that you start to hear it. Listen to how it speaks to the rhythm of it, what words it likes to use (feel free to make up words). Ask more than five questions if you’re on a roll, and, as with yesterday, if anything else arises in your mind while you’re doing this, jot it down too, follow any threads – see where it takes you!
Day 3: Hybrid Vocabularies
So far we’ve looked at the subject of being hybrid, and we’ve created a hybrid creature, and now we’re going to get playful with words and vocabularies!
Every field of endeavour has its own vocabulary – whether it’s mountain-climbing, quantum physics or cookery. These delicious words, like “crimp”, “cartouche”, “chasse”, “erythrocyte” and “spinor”, are treasure troves for the writer to plunder.
Task 1
I have given you three links below to glossaries of terms from mountain-climbing, cookery, figure skating, quantum mechanics and veterinary medicine, in the hope that none of you is actually a mountain-climbing figure-skating, food loving quantum physicist vet (if you are, please google “glossary” + “insert field you know nothing about”).
Pick the field you know least about, the one whose terms will be the most wonderfully unfamiliar to you, head to the glossary and have a wander. Jot down any words or phrases that appeal to you. If you have time, pop into another glossary and grab some novel words and terms from there. Try not to look too closely at what the words actually mean. That’s not what this exercise is about.
Task 2
Your writing exercise is to describe an activity that is familiar to you – it could be making a cup of coffee, going for a walk, changing the bed sheets – slipping in words from the glossary/glossaries that you plundered instead of some of your usual words. (You could turn the quantum physics term “spinor” into a verb and describe the process of putting a duvet cover on as “spinoring”, for example!)
Don’t worry about what the words actually mean or refer to, and don’t worry at all, as I said in the introduction, about making sense. Get playful! Your piece can be as short or as long as you want it to be – and, as with every task I set you, if it starts to go off into an unexpected direction, don’t stop yourself, get curious and follow it!
Day 4: Collisions and Mashups
As I mentioned in the introduction, one way to think of a hybrid piece of writing is as a mash-up or collision of existing genres. First, before we collide them, it’s worth stepping back and asking: what does “genre” mean? Here’s a thought from the fantastic Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres, edited by Marcela Sulak and Jacqueline Kolosov (Rose Metal Press, 2015):
“What is a literary genre but a family of works that resemble one another – in style, form, technique, goal or philosophy?… Genre can be viewed as affiliation.”
Let’s look at an example: crime fiction. When you start reading something that has been billed as a crime story or novel, there are certain things you can assume will probably occur. A crime. A victim of the crime. Someone investigating that crime. Each writer of crime fiction will take those and make it their own, do it in their own way, in their own style, but you could see how all crime novels could be thought of as members of the same family, although some may be very distant cousins.
And how about opera? Here you could reasonably assume there will be words and there will be music. Someone will most likely sing, and most probably on a stage. So, this is more of a family where the content (the stories) may be vastly different, but the form is similar.
What then might a hybrid do? Back to the Family Resemblance anthology:
“Hybrid literature are individual works that do not replicate any previously existing pattern of literary affiliation. They take features from multiple parents – multiple genres – and mix them to create a new entity.”
This is your task for today – collision! Below you will find a long list of genres and forms. Grab two. This time I am going to be firm. Only TWO. And then start writing. If it helps, you can think of it as writing something in the style of something else. Crime fiction in the style of a shopping list, say, or flash fiction in the style of instructions for a board game.
Since we’re on Day 4 and you’ve been exploring and getting curious far and wide for the past 3 days, you may already have an idea of where to start writing. If the blank page is a bit daunting and you need a prompt, go back to the numbered list you made on Day 1 and pick something from there to be your first sentence/line etc. It’s all about getting yourself going; you might later cut that out once you’ve found your (writing) feet in this piece.
Once again, I encourage you to get playful, to try something you’ve never done before – not to grab for, say, “flash fiction” because that’s been your favourite form – and not to listen to any voice in your head that tells you this isn’t “real” writing, it doesn’t make sense, what on earth are you writing anyway, or tries to make you put a label on it. Ditch the labels, climb out of the boxes!
Words for Collision
Shopping list
Recipe
Police report
Science experiment report
Opera
Flash fiction
Short story
Poem
Survival guide
Instruction manual
Encyclopaedia entry
Dictionary definition
Essay
Memoir
Lonely hearts ad
Agony aunt advice column
Letter
Text message
Sonnet (14 line poem)
Detective story
Science fiction
Captain’s log (flight log)
Phone call
Party invitation
Museum or art gallery item description
Job advert
CV
Tango
Board game (actual game or instructions for playing)
YouTube instructional video script
TV show
Comedy
Greek tragedy
Monologue
Rant
Musical
Play – stage or radio
Diary entry
Government white paper
Jury deliberations
Lawyer’s speech in court
Fairy tale
Aesop’s Fable (animals)
Nursery rhyme
Lullaby
Erotica
Love letter or break-up letter
Song
Collage
Newspaper article
Creative non-fiction
Award acceptance speech
Battlefield general’s speech to their troops
School lesson plan – and/or actual lesson
Manifesto – political or otherwise
Therapy session
Witness statement
Job interview
Cookery class
Training workshop
Music playlist
Funeral order of service and/or eulogy
Homework
Crossword clues
Fundraising pitch
Sports match commentary
Gravestone inscription
Graffiti
Note left on windscreen of car
Note passed in class
Map
Directions to or from somewhere
Alphabetical list
Tweets/social media post
Picture captions
Romance
Satire
Ghost story
Fan fiction
Journey/voyage
Murder mystery
Historical fiction
Religious text
Supernatural or paranormal– vampires, zombies etc…
Medical report
Young adult/teen fiction
Review – film, book or theatre
Book cover blurb
Royal decree
Confession
Prayer
Online forum discussion
Nature writing
Coming-of-age
War story
Script – film or play
Secretly taped conversation
TV or film end credits
Voice-over for documentary
A dream or nightmare
Wedding speech (anyone at the wedding)
Conversation with taxi driver or other stranger
Magic spell
Weather forecast
Financial report (stock market etc…)
Field guide to…
Quiz questions
Colour descriptions (farrow and ball paints, or nail polish colours, etc…)
Preloved/second hand item for sale – description
Architectural plan for a building
Biography
Terms and conditions
Marriage license or any other kind of license
Website ‘About Us’ page
Press release
Postcard
Parcel delivery note
Tannoy announcement
Day 5: This Is Not The End
This may be the final day of our 5-day hybrid writing challenge, but it is not the end. Any piece of writing, even a very short one, can take months or years to finish. But a first draft in five days, or even in a few hours, is perfectly possible. It’s a very rare event that any piece emerges in its almost finished form on the first go – most of the time I find I have to write my way into something (especially those things I call “hybrid”), following it until I find out what it actually might be. The first draft is when I’ve got to what pretty much feels like some kind of ending, but it is also a place to start. You can’t work until you have words on the page.
Task 1
So, you have (at least) four new pieces of writing from this week: your numbered list of notes from Day 1, your hybrid creature interview from Day 2, your activity description using hybrid vocabularies from Day 3 and the genre mash-up/collision you created yesterday – and you might also have the diary you’ve been keeping this week. What I’d like you to do is take one of these and mess with it further. (Yes, “mess with it” is a technical writing term). Please do keep every version of your text so that, if you like, your final piece might involve two or more of these versions/iterations.
You can mess with a piece of text in so many different ways. One thing we haven’t looked at yet is the shape of words on the page.
- You could alter/evolve your piece by adding footnotes, which might do what footnotes usually do (1), or depart from this genre convention entirely and do something else (2). Footnotes change the reading experience by at the very least catching a reader’s eye, and perhaps making them step out of the main text and look down towards the bottom of the page.
- Another way to alter your text is to add in one or more visual elements – which could be images, or might involve changing fonts (I love using different fonts, here are some ideas https://www.1001fonts.com/).
- You could make part of it into a bullet point list.
You might decide to collide your chosen text with part of one of the other texts you’ve created this week – bring in some of what your hybrid creature said in the interview, say, or slide in a quote from one of the articles you read on Day 1 or one of the diary entries if you’ve kept a diary this week. Nothing is off limits here – do as much “messing” as you want!
All of these might feel fun and playful – which I hope they are – but my aim here is not just to break you out of your normal modes of thinking about writing, but also to help you say what you want to say in the way you want to say it. You don’t need to know what you are writing “about” or want to say – I very often have no clue at all, and sometimes only discover what something might be “about” after I’ve finished, or after it has been published, maybe months or years later.
I didn’t want to say this until our final day together because I don’t believe in “shoulds” or too much direction when it comes to the creation of first drafts, but all the colliding and playing around might just unlock something, perhaps an idea you’ve been trying to get down on the page for a while, something that’s been too hard to approach head on, say. Or that you tried writing as a piece of memoir but find that it comes out closer to how you want to say it when it’s in the voice of your hybrid creature.
The above might not speak to you, you might not have tackled something you’ve been thinking about for a while, you may have created something entirely new. I hope at least you surprised yourself, which is the best feeling for any kind of artist!
- Explain something that is referred to in the text
- No, said the cloud, this is not where I want to be.
Task 2
And then: put this piece away. Let it lie, ideally for at least a few weeks, maybe longer. Nothing but nothing is more useful for a writer than stepping away from what today is their Most Precious Creation and waiting for a while until they can see it with fresh eyes, see what works, what perhaps might not be needed. You might want to take off a layer of the “messing” that you did – or add more. As I mentioned at the start, your resulting piece might not look like a hybrid at all, and only you will know that the process of reaching it was a hybrid one.
It’s been fun sharing this week with you, here’s to writing what you want in the way that you want it!
Further Reading
Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres, by Marcela Sulak and Jacqueline Kolosov (Rose Metal Press, 2015)
Tania’s Hybrid Writing Twitter List: https://twitter.com/i/lists/853709452159143937
Places to Read and Submit Writing to
DIAGRAM journal
Cutbow Quarterly: “Home of the hybrid. A literary and arts magazine that showcases new and exciting hybrid work.”
https://www.cutbowquarterly.com
Tolka journal: “A journal of formally promiscuous non-fiction, publishing essays, memoir, autofiction and the overflow.”
Harpy Hybrid Review: ”We seek works that are hybrid or cross-genre in form as well as visual art.”
http://www.harpyhybridreview.org
The Liminal Review: “A literature and arts journal that is looking for the things that are made in the in-between spaces. We want your abstract feelings, your bent encounters, your thoughts on anything. The things that don’t fully fit anywhere else, we want to give them a space.”
Passage: “An autotheoretical, hybrid, creative-critical writing project and journal based in Hasselt University, Belgium”
https://www.projectpassage.net
Peatsmoke journal: “Fiction, non-fiction, poems, flash, hybrid, art”. https://www.peatsmokejournal.com
Tarpaulin Sky Press; “Cross-genre, trans-genre, anti-genre, occult. Even got music(k).” https://tarpaulinsky.com