Why genre hopping is good for you as a writer

Variety makes you a better writer, even though agents and publishers want you to specialise.

I recently finished reading Range by David Epstein which delves into the science of why being a generalist can give you a long-term advantage. It was an unexpected but very welcome relief.

About four months ago, I wrote about being a generalist in what turned out to be the most popular post I’ve ever written on LinkedIn. It was a repost of a “love letter to generalists” by Maya Meyouhas, and in my comments I talked about how haphazard my career has been, characterised by spotting and pursuing interesting opportunities rather than having any sort of long term plan. The short and relatively tidy version of my CV is that I gained a degree in geology, went into science publishing, then worked as a music journalist before getting into technology, co-founding the Open Rights Group, becoming a tech and media consultant, then founding Ada Lovelace Day. Reality is much, much messier than that. 

Some people have an I-shaped career, becoming specialists with a deep knowledge in just one area. Others have a T-shaped career with a wide knowledge with a bit of specialism chucked in as well. But I have a em-dash shaped career, like an —, because I have a bit of an interest in and knowledge of a lot of different things. 

Exactly what that means for my broader career I am not quite sure, but for a while there I was feeling quite down about it. The world is in love with specialists at the moment. In an increasingly warped attention economy, which rewards fewer and fewer people with more and more eyeballs, those with expert knowledge can easily leverage it into income. 

What happens, then, to the rest of us? 

Perhaps because I was already struggling with feelings of inadequacy about my career prospects, I found Range to be an amazing eye-opener. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that explains me to myself quite so clearly, nor one that makes me feel like my rampant curiosity might actually be an advantage. 

I was particularly taken by the far too short section about the role of generalism in writing. Epstein looked at work by Alva Taylor and Henrich Greve, who investigated “the creative impact of individual breadth” in the realm of comic books. They had assumed that comic book creators who made more comics over a shorter span of time would be more commercially successful. That turned out not to be true. 

They also:

guessed that the more resources a publisher had, the better its creators’ average product would be. Wrong. And they made the very intuitive prediction that as creators’ years of experience in the industry increased, they would make better comics on average. Wrong again. 

A high-repetition workload negatively impacted performance. Years of experienced had no impact at all. If not experience, repetition, or resources, what helped creators make better comics on average and innovate?

The answer? How many different genres a creator had worked in. 

Where length of experience did not differentiate creators, breadth of experience did. Broad genre experience made creators better on average and more likely too innovate. 

Whilst early career creators were less likely to “produce a smash hit” than teams, “an individual creator who had worked in four or more genres was more innovative than a team whose members had a collective experiences across the same number of genres”. 

In short, it’s better to sample and explore different genres early in your career and keep that variety going to ensure that you can internalise and synthesise what you’ve learnt from each experience. 

This makes me feel a lot more hopeful about my future as a writer. Over the years, I’ve written in a ridiculous number of genres: 

Non-fiction

• Music journalism.

• Tech news journalism.

• Features.

• Opinion pieces and columns. 

• Client reports. 

• Think tank reports. 

• Blog posts, both factual and personal. 

• Biographies and profiles. 

• Subject matter reports. 

• Governmental enquiry submissions. 

Fiction (including trunked and abandoned works)

• Science fiction.

• Fantasy. 

• Urban fantasy. 

• Disaster. 

• Comedy. 

• General fiction. 

• Techno thriller. 

I’ve also written in a variety of formats: Short stories, novellas, novels, film scripts, TV drama, and sitcom. 

My ideas file contains even more variety, from a ridiculously complicated multiple timeline pseudo-memoir examining all the key inflection points in my life and how thing could have gone if I’d chosen differently, to an AngloAmerican romcom, to a feminist exploration of how women’s science is devalued and stolen by men. 

What Epstein has given me, for the first time in quite a long while, is hope. It’s so easy at this, ah, ‘pre-success’ stage of one’s writing career to feel quite pessimistic about one’s chances. As someone whose blog tagline has been “bubbling enthusiasm for $arbitrary_topic” since 2001, I was starting to worry that my butterfly mind was going to be the undoing of me. But perhaps, instead, my insatiable curiosity will turn out to be a good thing. 

Of course, the idea of working across a variety of genres goes against the publishing industry grain. From what I’ve seen, agents and publishers really do prefer it when authors pick a lane and stay in it. Authors who write in two different genres often end up using a pen name for their second genre. Who knows how they’d cope with an author who wrote in three or more genres on a consistent basis?

This may well be because readers like to get more of the same once they find something they like, but readers are poorly served by constraining authors to one genre. If we want great literature, including great genre literature, then we need our authors to feel empowered to wander the literary land, trying out new things and learning from their experiences. 

So if you want to develop your writing skills, experiment. Read widely and write widely. Try immersing yourself in different genres, different formats, different styles. Be like Hayao Miyazaki, best known for the beautiful Spirited Away, whose work “ranged from pure fantasy and fairy tales to historical fiction, sci-fi, slapstick comedy, illustrated historical essays, action-adventure, and much more.” 

Variety is indeed the spice of a writing life.