I always carry a Swiss Army knife in my pocket. There are blades folded into it. But there’s also a bottle opener that doubles as a wire stripper. A can opener that’s also a mini flathead screwdriver that also functions as a Phillips. But the true uses of the tools are far more expansive than any catalogue description.
Not long ago my daughter turned sixteen and requested a steak-house dinner. We all dressed up for the occasion—and she wore heels, something that doesn’t happen very often. The fit wasn’t right. Her feet kept slipping out. The hundred yards from our car to the restaurant might as well have been a mile. I sat her down on a garden wall. She removed the shoes. I pulled out the knife. I punched a fresh hole in the leather straps of the heels and fitted them back on, fastening them tight. No tears marinated her steak and baked potato that night.
The other day, during a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, in the midst of a particularly intense battle with a gang of coldlight walkers, the lead in my pencil broke. We—a group of middle-aged men known as the Fantasy Fathers—might have gathered our bodies around a kitchen table busy with maps and pewter figurines and twenty-sided dice…but in our minds we had transported ourselves into the snow-blasted realm of Icewind Dale. I pulled out the knife and used the blade to hurriedly shave my pencil into a point just in time to log the twenty-seven points of cold damage my character took.
I could go on. I have used the flathead screwdriver to open the battery slot on my MacBook, to scrape some dried chewing gum off the bottom of a table, to pop an old wasp nest off a soffit vent. The manufacturer did not build the multi-tool with an expectation of only one task but many. Versatility and improvisation are a given.
This captures my feelings about craft.
You consider yourself a novelist. A poet. A nonfiction writer. But when you spend enough time hunched over the keyboard, you’re often not just a novelist—you’re a novelist who writes Norwegian mysteries. Or you’re a poet known for nature sonnets. Or you’re a nonfiction writer who specializes in political biographies. There’s certainly power and comfort in specialization; you can think of it as a honing, but…you can also think of it as a narrowing. Or even a settling into habit.
We all know that novelist whose new book feels like a watered-down replication of the last. We all know that memoirist who keeps finding yet another scar from their past to open back up. In some ways, they might start to resemble your parents, who order the same thing on the menu and listen to the same rotation of CDs and, for God knows what reason, still pay for AOL. They get cranky when their routines are interrupted. When we were visiting my parents recently, my son gave up on a leaky air mattress and opted to sleep on the couch. My father was completely taken aback. “But that’s where I read every night,” he said.
“Well, Dad,” I said. “I guess you’ll just have to read someplace else.”
His shoulders slumped. He was lost and upset.
I see this occasionally in students who can’t understand why we’re talking about comics or movies or country music in a fiction writing workshop.
I get it. I recognize your affliction. People love a tidy label. I’m an Aries with Taurus rising. I’m a Joey, I’m a Monica. I’m a Judging Introvert or whatever the hell Myers-Briggs designation. Go ahead. Fill out that BuzzFeed quiz that tells you which Game of Thrones character you most resemble. There’s something reassuring about a mold that fits. But people are fucking messy. And messy can be interesting. I’m encouraging mess as form of experimentation and constant reinvention.
The filmmaker Ryan Coogler had a hell of a debut with Fruitvale Station, which told the true story of Oscar Grant’s last day alive before getting gunned down by police in Oakland. This 2013 indie darling had a budget of only $900,000, but it launched Coogler into directing the $35 million Creed and then the $200 million monster that was Black Panther. For a decade that’s where he lived—inside these blockbuster franchises, all of them badass but formula-driven and studio-controlled. And that’s where he could have kept living for the rest of his career.
Instead, he made Sinners. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should stream it immediately. Coogler wrote it, directed it, produced it, and had the final cut. This wasn’t the Rocky or Marvel Universe; it was the Coogler-verse. He took a gutsy swing—outside of his or anyone else’s wheelhouse—and it shattered expectations. Sinners is a historical drama. It is a gangster film. It is a blues musical. And it is a vampire film. You could say there’s something messy about that, but, if so, it’s a beautiful mess. He did not play by the rules of business or craft. Sinners is a defiance of genre. And it is a reinvention of the vampire myth steeped in themes of colonialism and appropriation.
This is a marquee example, but I think the comparison can be made between Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019). Vuong published two chapbooks and a collection of poetry before shaking up the literary world with a novel that is also a letter that is also a poem. The same could be said of Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Fantagraphics, 2017), which is a work of fiction that is also a series of diary entries in a composition notebook that is also a graphic novel.
The fluidity of forms is a constant surprise and delight.
Let’s say you were inspired. Let’s say you were willing to order something new off the menu or read in a different chair.
That’s how I felt when I took a poetry workshop in grad school with Rodney Jones. We would spend an hour unpacking a poem. My attention was forced into the microscopic. I slowed down in a way I never had before. Every word—its singular emphasis, its spatial and lyrical and thematic arrangement within the whole—took on a world of meaning invisible to me until then.
I don’t write poetry, but the influence of that workshop follows me wherever I go. When I write a sentence—or an incomplete sentence. When I think about where to break a paragraph or a chapter. When I think about motifs as a rhyme. When I build rhythmic lists. When I …
When I script comics, I consider a dialogue balloon or narrative caption as equivalent to a stanza. And I consider the transitional and suspenseful power of the image I choose to close out my page—the hinge of it operating like a line break, giving the reader the emphasis of punctuation, of meaning, of mystery. The white space of a poem is the page turn of a funny book.
I could make similar claims about how writing comics made me a better novelist. The economy of language. The constraint of a content-rich, twenty-page script. The accelerated plotting. The math-like agreement between a hero’s inner conflict as it’s externalized in the villain who must be overcome.
What I learned from writing audio dramas—about environmental sound cues, expository dialogue, framing episodes, creating distinctive voices, building clear exits and on-ramps for scenes—challenged and changed me so much I need another essay to explore it all.
Dissolving boundaries expands my craft arsenal. Openness to new mediums and genres expands my ideas and problem-solving.
What if—for the sake of a good stretch and a cracked back, because we know that limbering the muscles is good for you—what if you challenge yourself to kick down some doors?
Here’s an exercise. Write your novel as a song. Here’s an exercise. If you could transform your short story into a painting, what would it look like? Here’s an exercise. Take that free-verse poem and shift it into a sonnet. Adapt your memoir into a screenplay. Imagine your screenplay into a comic book.
Your keyboard is a knife, but it is also a saw and a nail file and a screwdriver and a can opener. Growing too rigid in your thinking and practice will dull the possibilities of your creative life. If you defamiliarize yourself, you will in turn surprise and thrill your reader. Write as a multi-tool.
Benjamin Percy is the author of seven novels and three story collections as well as a book of essays, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf Press, 2016), which is widely taught in creative writing classrooms. At Marvel Comics he writes Wolverine, The Punisher, Deadpool, and other series. His eighth novel, The End Times, delivered as a series of monthly tabloid-sized newspapers over the course of a year, is now available for subscription at Bad Hand Books.
Thumbnail credit: Eric Mueller