Writing the World

Hanife Altan

by Irene Cooper | November 2026

This is a blog about genre.

In academic writing classes, genre often refers to form—the academic research essay, for example, is a genre; journalism is a genre, with subgenres of news articles, interviews, and feature pieces. The blog is a genre, as are business communications, including email.

Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and/or hybrids of these categories are the broad genres of creative writing. However, genre from a publishing and popular point of view most often indicates where in the stacks you’ll find a particular book—commercial fiction (which may include mystery, horror, thriller, romance, fantasy, and more), literary fiction (very broad), young adult fiction, children’s literature (board books, picture books, middle grade), self-help, memoir, biography, science, spiritual, poetry, graphic novels, cookbooks, travelogues, etc. Sometimes it seems like there are as many genres for books and writing as there are readers.

You Write You

As a reader, your literary palate may welcome a wide variety of genres, depending on the season and your mood. As a writer, however, it’s likely you lean into one particular genre more than another. Which is not to say you can’t and don’t experiment with poetry, even if you love to write short stories, or spend most of your writing practice plugging away at a memoir or novel. Experimenting is great—it presents new challenges; it sharpens our skills and our curiosity.

Usually, though, there’s a genre we particularly enjoy writing, a lens through which we express ourselves that feels clearer and more uniquely us than another. Genre can offer a conduit to say what we want to say, often and especially when the things we want to say are difficult.

I think of George Saunders trying to write like Ernest Hemingway, and finding out, accidentally, that absurdism and not modernist realism is the way he could write about corporate soullessness and the human condition. I am reminded of William Carlos Williams, trying to write poems like Romantic poet John Keats before hacking all that language back into an image of a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain.

And I’m thinking of a conversation one of my fellow Forge instructors and I had recently about Slaughterhouse Five, about the many attempts Kurt Vonnegut made to write about his harrowing and heartbreaking experience in Dresden in WWII before creating Billy Pilgrim and a science fiction classic.

Form & Metaphor: Put the Craft to Work

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado is a work of nonfiction that tells a story (many stories) about domestic abuse through vignettes and repetition and unexpected variations in style. When some of the writers to whom I’ve recommended the book talk about why they like it, they mention the experiment of it—the innovation—but almost always remark, too, on how natural that experiment seems. Machado found a way to write, beautifully, about a complex and painful and very real subject, with all its gravity, silliness, humor, and unanswerable questions, using the metaphor of the house.

Suzanne Collins said in an interview that The Hunger Games was inspired by an experience that disturbed her deeply—she’s been flipping through TV channels one night and saw young people fighting in an actual war on one channel, and children in a competition on another. These two sets of images, combined with the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, came together to create the fictional series. Anne Rice has said her Vampire Chronicles evolved from the grief the author felt at losing her young daughter to leukemia. In these cases, fiction (and metaphor) provided a way to stay close to and work and these subjects while at the same time allowing a measure of emotional distance from these terrible realities.

I mentioned this was a blog about genre, but really it’s about the possibilities of expression genre makes available. There’s more than one way to write the world, in all its dimension.

There’s your way, in your voice.

The Forge creative program is a 10-month online intensive designed to help you light a fire under your writing and keep it lit. New term starts in January 2027. Get in touch at theforgewriting@gmail.com to schedule a free 15-minute chat to see if The Forge is a fit for you.

Getting from Here to There: transitions in creative writing

Photo: Nur Andi Ravsanjani Gusma

by Ellen Santasiero  |  October 2026

Often our Forge students admit they have produced several pages of what they think is disjointed prose.

When we read their writing, sometimes we determine that they, in fact, have got two or more separate pieces started, but other times we see that they just need technique.

In writing, we get from here to there by creating what we call a “transition.” At times we want or need to change geography or era, perhaps to provide backstory—like suddenly have our main character show up thirty years earlier in 1990s Hackensack. Other times we need to change theme or point-of-view. A good transition will make sure our readers get from one place to another in a pleasurable, sense-making way. Some techniques work better in fiction; others in nonfiction.

In a piece of nonfiction where thoughts meander on the page, getting from here to there thematically can be achieved by a simple technique, as seen in a passage by Caryl Pagel in her essay “Lost in Thought.”

Pagel opens the essay with an extended description of her aimless walks around Chicago (to take breaks from writing) and the trance-like state such perambulation induces. What she really wants to muse on are photographs by Harry Callahan, whose work consists of images of 1950s women who look like they are in a trance, and which Pagel analyzes for fifteen more pages. How does she get from here to there?

On page three, she writes, “Around and around the city I’d pace … and it was during one of these walks that I recalled the work of Harry Callahan … ” (emphasis mine)

The bold text above shows how Pagel transitions from discussing her own trance-like states to those of the women in Callahan’s work. Sometimes writers can’t believe transitioning can be this easy.

In his marvelous 1933 essay “In Praise of Shadows,” Jun'ichirō Tanizaki demonstrates a technique we love. He selects an image, or a word, that appears near the end of one paragraph, and uses that same image or word at the beginning of the next.

(emphasis mine) (20)

The essayist pivots from discussing artwork to discussing architecture. Not a huge leap thematically, but without this choice, the transition from one paragraph to the next might be abrupt, and, importantly, would be most unfitting in a meditation on the virtues of softness. Moreover, Tanizaki’s consistent use of this technique throughout elevates “In Praise of Shadows” to poem-like heights.

White space, almost always used in poetry, can work in prose, too. A half inch or more of space between two sections in a work of prose signals to the reader’s brain that a change is a-coming. They pause. And in pausing, they are prepared for a shift in place, time, theme, or point-of-view.

We ask students to experiment to see which technique works best for their particular vision, and that’s where the real learning happens!

If you are unsure how to move from here to there in your work, join us in January 2027. We’ll be helping writers do that, and much more! theforgewriting.com

Sources:

Pagel, Caryl. Out of Nowhere into Nothing. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2020.

Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō. Vintage Tanizaki: In Praise of Shadows. Translated by Thomas Harper and Edward Seidensticker, Stony Creek, CT. Leete’s Island Books, 1977.

Anecdote or Story?

Mike Cooper – September 2026

There is an old rule in writing: “Write what you know.”

Whether you’re writing fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, you’re writing based on experience and observation. Bear in mind, though, that “what you know” includes everything you can possibly imagine. Look at the work of Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft, for example.

Regardless of whether you’re reporting or inventing, if you want to publish (make public) your work, you’ll want it to come out in the form of a story. We expect story. We learn from story.

We share what we call “stories” with friends and family all day long, which is great—it’s how we communicate and bond—though a lot of the things we tell each other aren’t full-on stories:

·      My teacher brought a snake into class today and Alex Johnson fainted!

·      I opened the cupboard and your favorite wine glass fell out, but I caught it just before it hit the counter! My heart was racing.

·      They didn’t have any ramen in the pasta section, but then I was walking through the Asian aisle, really by accident, and lo and behold, there was an entire section of it.

·      I met your mother when we were at school: she was going up the stairway and I was going down. Our eyes met and we both smiled at each other. The rest is history.

An anecdote (from the Greek anekdotos, meaning “unpublished”) is “short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident.” An anecdote is something that happens.

Stories, on the other hand, have structure: beginnings, middles, ends—inciting incidents, complications, climaxes, resolutions, meaning, and significance.

Often, anecdotes lead us to stories. Our memoir about a challenging time, or a thinly disguised short story written by a narrator that is really us but younger and with two different colored eyes and possibly set in a place we’ve only researched on Google (still “what you know”) often starts out as anecdote or “plot”: i.e., this happened and then this happened and then this happened.

That’s a great way to start. It’s what some folks call the “triggering subject,” or the thing that gets you wondering about the human condition—the thing you want to share with others. So we write that, and when we’re done writing it—if we want to “publish,” or make available to a wider audience—we try to figure out what it’s all about and how best to share it with others. That’s what some folks call the “generated” or “real” subject. In The Forge, we call it “aboutness.”

Now our job is to look at what we’ve written and become the editor, or as Zadie Smith says: the reader. And we make it into story.

That’s what we teach in The Forge. We’d love to have you join us and go through that journey with you. Classes start January 2027. Send us an email at theforgewriting@gmail.com and we’ll be happy to get you started.