Having urged aspiring writers to try their hand at many different forms of the writer’s art, I must now introduce a necessary cautionary note. Competence in one area is not something that transfers automatically to another.
Examples of those who have failed to recognize this crowd instantly into our minds. The fact that Michael Jordan was one of the greatest basketball players ever does not mean he can play professional baseball. The fact that someone can play baseball, a mean second baseman for the Yankees, say, does not make him an expert on the latest superglidefusion razor blades. The fact that dad flips a Saturday morning flapjack in a manner second to none does not mean that he should be allowed to prepare the souffle for the big dinner. And the fact that a writer has sold a bazillion copies of one kind of writing does not mean that anybody wants to read his other stuff. Expertise in the possum hunter’s cookbook genre does not mean that a writer will have the nuanced ear that is needed for haiku. What might happen is the inadvertent creation of a new genre entirely — as may have happened, who knows, with redneck haiku. Speaking of which, through the magic of google, we can summon up an example almost instantly . . .
In early morning mist,
Mama searches Circle K for
Moon Pies and Red Man.
So my advice is that writers should fool around in their workshop with all kinds of writing. They should not expect a huge market for all of it, even if they are hauling in the big bucks in one particular area. If they are not hauling in big bucks for any of their writing, they should consider their forays into alien genres the way a boxer considers his pushups.
But the world is a funny place. Usually this problem arises for writers because they made it big in an area they were pretty good in, and then they want to branch out into more artistically respectable directions — in which they display no talent whatever.
Suppose someone hit the NYT Bestseller List with his Chevy Malibu Repair for Dummies, and then he wants to follow it up with his photos of Yosemite captioned with his prose poems inspired by the antics of the family cocker spaniel named Cutes (Ansel Adams meets Annie Dillard meets T.S. Eliot). His publisher is a man of little faith. He can afford to humor the big author, but is not looking forward to the banter at the next New York publishers’ wine and cheese get together. But he needn’t worry — they have their versions of the same kind of thing, say a teen-aged fantasy writer who thinks he is a cross between the author of Beowulf and Tolkien on one of his good days. And who said so to a reporter.
But sometimes the problem goes the other way. Sometimes someone makes the big time in an area where they are not all that good, but in other areas they are quite good.
Take Eugene Peterson. As a capable wordsmith of thoughtful, devotional prose, he is very good. For example, his Introduction to Tell It Slant exhibits all the consonance you could ask for when considering his words and his subject matter. And though I differ with one of the basic points he was making there, he nevertheless made it very well. The man can write.
But it was his 2002 colloquial rendition of the Bible, The Message, where Peterson really made it as a writer. But translating the Bible means translating the Psalms, and the Psalms are one of the poetic glories of all human history. Now Peterson’s conviction is that “give us this day our daily bread” and “pass the potatoes” come “out of the same language pool” (p. 2). He wants continuity of language whether we are studying the Bible or fishing for rainbow trout (p. 4).
The misfire result is that in the Message Psalms he has taken a collection of Hebrew glories and crammed them full of English cliches — “lie through their teeth,” “within an inch of my life,” “the end of my rope,” “only have eyes for you,” “down on their luck,” “every bone in my body,” “sit up and take notice,” “rule the roost,” “the bottom has fallen out,” “free as a bird,” “kicked around long enough,” “my life’s an open book,” “at the top of my lungs,” “nearly did me in,” “sell me a bill of goods,” “wide open spaces,” “stranger in these parts,” “hard on my heels,” “from dawn to dusk,” “skin and bones,” “turn a deaf ear,” “eat me alive,” “all hell breaks loose,” “raise the roof,” “wipe the slate clean,” “miles from nowhere,” and, as they say on the teevee, much, much more. If cliches were candied fruit, walnuts, and raisins, the Book of Psalms in The Message would be a three-pound fruitcake.
So let this be a cautionary tale. The fact that you have written spy thrillers that have Tom Clancy’s publicist worried does not mean that you should take up the project of translating The Odyssey into an extended chain of limericks.