Writing Between Genres: The Power of the In-Between
Some stories want to be poems.
Some poems want to become essays.
Some essays pretend to be fiction until they reveal the truth.
And sometimes, a piece of writing resists every container we try to place it in.
If that’s where you are — welcome. You’re not lost.
You’re a hybrid writer.
At 724 Press Collective, we’ve built a home for work that blurs, crosses, questions, and fuses. Hybrid forms aren’t just trend or novelty — they’re how many of us survive the limits of traditional genre. They’re what happens when the form isn’t big enough to hold the feeling.
✍️ What Is Hybrid Writing, Really?
Hybrid work lives in the liminal space — the space between.
It might blend:
Poetry + prose
Memoir + criticism
Visual art + text
Lists + narrative
Text messages + inner monologue
Or it might do something harder to define — something that doesn’t quite fit any box, because it’s inventing its own.
Hybrid work asks:
What happens if I write a breakup in footnotes?
What if my grief looks like a spreadsheet?
What if my family history is best told through fragmented images and myth?
💡 Why Hybrid Writing Matters
Hybrid writing gives voice to what doesn’t fit neatly in a sentence.
It makes space for contradiction.
It reflects real life: nonlinear, layered, messy, beautiful.
For BIPOC, LGBTQ+, neurodivergent, and disabled writers — and anyone whose identity has been boxed in by traditional forms — hybrid writing isn’t just aesthetic. It’s freedom. It’s survival.
🌱 How to Begin (or Embrace Where You Already Are)
If you’re feeling drawn toward the hybrid, start by giving yourself permission to break the form — or let the form break itself.
Try these:
Fragment first. Write in pieces, not paragraphs. See what wants to stay disconnected.
Borrow structure. Write a poem in the shape of a police report, recipe, apology letter, or love contract.
Collage your way in. Combine journal entries, screenshots, quotes, and your own commentary. Let juxtaposition do the storytelling.
Let genre come later. Write freely first. Ask what it feels like — not what it’s supposed to be.
🧠 The Publishing Question
“But where would I even publish this?”
It’s a fair concern — and also the wrong question to start with.
Write the work that feels necessary. Then seek the homes — like 724 Press Collective Literary Blog,The Sneaky Ottoman Review, ANMLY, The Offing, Foglifter, or collectives like ours — that are already championing genre-fluid voices.
And if no existing space feels right? Build one. That’s how 724 Press Collective began.
🔥 Final Thought: Let It Be What It Is
If your work is strange, unclassifiable, nonlinear, layered — good.
You’re writing into the future.
The most interesting forms don’t follow rules. They rewrite them.
So go ahead. Write the text message elegy. The comic-book memoir. The prose poem about God and your grocery list.
We’ll be here for it.
📬 Submit to us. Collaborate with us. Grow with us.
We’re 724 Press Collective: publishing for the genre-defiant, the fragmented, the fiercely feeling.
🖋️ @724presscollective | 724presscollective@gmail.com
