Writing across Genres
Writing Across Genres
By Julie Tollefson
Writing across genres and styles comes naturally to Sandra Jackson-Opoku. The award-winning Chicago author’s work spans adult literary fiction, middle grade and young adult fiction, nonfiction, drama and — with her 2020 short story “She Loves Trouble” and forthcoming cozy mystery Sweet Potato Crimes — crime fiction. “I’m too curious of a person to stick to one thing,” she says.
Here, Sandra offers five tips for the crime fiction writer unwilling to be bound by labels.
1) Good storytelling is good storytelling, regardless of genre — Skills you’ve acquired writing crime fiction will serve you well as you explore other formats and styles.
“Beautiful writing is something that I strive for in whatever form or genre I’m writing in,” Sandra says. “Economy and brevity and lyrical language and sometimes voice can inform other forms of writing.”
Even in nonfiction, though you’re not creating characters, the same principles apply. “Constructing a person and presenting them in such a way that engages the reader, I think is the same across all of the genres,” she says.
Sandra, who is polishing her first full-length script for the stage, says one fiction skill that translated well to dramatic writing is her ability to create effective dialogue.
“Novelists don’t always make the best dramatic writers because one of the powers and one of the inextricable elements of fiction writing is the interior monologue, the thoughts and the feelings of characters,” she says. “It’s really hard to do that in dramatic writing. You’ve got to figure out how to vocalize or dramatize to give a sense of the interior monologue.”
Listening to how people speak and how they express themselves is the key to sharpening your skills to create realistic and believable dialogue.
2) Immerse yourself in your new form — Sandra, already successful as a fiction and nonfiction writer, recently turned her talents toward the stage, and that meant a shift in the way she approached her work.
“I love the theater. My preparation probably would have been seeing a lot of theater but it just so happened that I started writing this play during the pandemic,” she says. “The pandemic wreaked havoc on the performing arts and so it was a while before theaters were up and running again.”
Instead, Sandra read a lot of plays and watched film versions that were available online or through streaming services. Some playhouses pivoted to online presentations, giving her different perspectives as she refreshed and expanded her knowledge of dramatic writing.
She also applied for and was chosen for Lifeline Theatre’s inaugural BIPOC Adaptation Showcase, a fellowship that allowed her to adapt “Hungry Ghost Festival,” a chapter from her novel-in-progress, Black Rice, for the stage.
“I’ve written dramatic work before, but this is my first effort in something of this magnitude,” Sandra says. She’s currently immersed in an arts residency program at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where she’s working with Addae Moon, a theater artist from Atlanta, to revise and polish the script to ready the play for production.
3) Stretch genre boundaries — For Sandra, writing crime fiction is an opportunity to push the genre to be more inclusive of voices and perspectives that have been underrepresented.
“I think one of the things that has attracted me to writing crime fiction has been some historical inequities and wrongs that need to be righted,” she says. “The cop is not always the hero, the criminal is not always the villain, and there are infinite shades of grays and complexities.”
Sandra points to Crime Writers of Color, founded in 2018 by Walter Mosley, Gigi Pandian, and Kellye Garrett and recipient of this year’s MWA Raven Award, as a leader in pushing the genre’s boundaries.
“Crime Writers of Color is doing fabulous work not just supporting crime writers from different racial experiences but also educating and trying to sensitize the reading public and the publishing industry to the diversity of voices that are out there writing crime fiction,” Sandra says.
4) Stretch yourself — “I think I’ve always been interested in different forms, from a very young age,” says Sandra. “When I get excited about reading works in different genres and in different literary disciplines, then I’m inclined to try to experiment in that form myself.”
Sandra’s background is in journalism, work that has directly informed her fiction.
“Travel writing has been a real source of inspiration for my fiction writing,” she says. “It allows me to travel to sometimes faraway destinations to learn about other cultures, to acquire new experiences and often times develop and stimulate ideas for new work.”
5) Pick and choose — Often, Sandra says, projects choose her. An experience when she travels. A nugget of information or historical detail she stumbles across. A news story or a long-standing family secret that’s been gnawing at her for years. All have served as inspiration for her vast body of work. (“Don’t be like me,” she says with a laugh, “spreading yourself too thin with too many projects.”)
Sandra makes decisions regarding format and genre on a project-by-project basis.
“Some projects, I know exactly what form they’re going to be. Like a children’s book — I think it’s always clear from the outset that this is going to be a children’s story,” she says. “But then there’s some projects, I just don’t know until I start writing and research what it’s going to be. And then there are some projects, like the 'Hungry Ghost' project, that are two things — a novel excerpt as well as a play.”
Being so prolific can be challenging, especially if she’s juggling multiple projects at the same time.
“In the morning I might be doing some original writing for my play and in the afternoon I’m doing revisions and edits, maybe incorporating feedback from my agent or an editor, in a novel,” she says.
The upside is that different aspects of a writer's practice — idea generation, drafting, revision, research — employ different parts of the creative brain.
“When I’m working on something and I get stuck, then I have something else to go to,” she says.