This is part three of a five-part series on the craft of writing by Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante.

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Genre isn’t a cage. It’s a container.

That’s the simple but often-misunderstood premise we explore in The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre. For many writers—especially those early in their practices—genre can feel like a set of restrictions, a forced allegiance to a particular mode of telling. But we think of genre as a set of tools and temperaments that can help you make strategic decisions about form, structure, and voice. Not limits to resist, but structures to build within—containers that can hold the heat of your material.

Poetry sharpens attention to rhythm, image, and compression; it teaches you to let silence and white space carry emotional weight. Fiction invites imagined causality—not to mirror reality, but to better understand or dig deeper into the mysteries of experience or to reimagine it. Its great strength is its ability to generate meaning through invention and structure. Creative nonfiction, by contrast, demands loyalty to fact but offers infinite flexibility in perspective, interpretation, and voice. You can telescope time, braid multiple timelines, withhold or emphasize a detail—and in doing so, shape a personal truth with precision. These aren’t rigid boundaries. They’re pressures that reward different instincts. A strong writer doesn’t just write within a form; they choose their container based on what the work needs to become.

That’s what Monique Jenkinson did in her debut book, Faux Queen, which she describes as “a collection of essays in drag as a memoir.” Jenkinson—a dancer, choreographer, and the first cis woman to win a major drag pageant—could’ve written about any number of personal or professional identities. But instead of letting the book sprawl, she imposed constraints. “I produced thousands more words than I used—literal excess,” she said. “Then I invited  [my editrix, or inner editor] back in to impose the constraint of the drag filter. I hope there is still the right amount of excess spilling over in the places that want it.”

Her book, like her performances, lives in the productive tension between discipline and excess. “The real genesis of the book’s material,” she explains, “was a choreographic constraint.” Monologues she once used onstage while changing costumes became the seeds of her written chapters. She shaped the work to honor drag’s theatricality and her memoir’s emotional arc. And she cut anything that didn’t shine light on her central themes: art, identity, femininity, humor, and friendship. In doing so, she didn’t just choose the right genre. She built the right container and made it hold.

Genre is not unlike choreography or architecture. It gives shape and boundaries—but within those boundaries, anything can happen.

That process—of listening to the work’s needs and responding with formal choices—is echoed by poet Randall Mann. In an interview with Tobias Wray for The Adroit Journal, Mann said, “Each poem is asking for its own architecture; perhaps I am learning how to listen better to its demands… Form and content are not merely complementary, they are the very same thing.” His short lines, often rhymed, serve not just as decoration or discipline but as content-generating structures. “In a time of logorrhea,” he writes, “I love the demands of the short line, and the way rhymes offer up content—if I listen to the poem.”

This is exactly how we encourage our students to think about genre. Not as a set of fixed boxes that one must fit into, but as an evolving conversation between form and content. When students say “I only write fiction” or “I’m not a poet,” we challenge them—gently—to try the opposite. Not to convert them, but to give them tools. We’ve watched prose writers learn concision through poetry. We’ve seen memoirists find emotional truth through fictional distance. The point isn’t to become a formalist or a hybridist. It’s to make the best possible choices for your material.

Genre, in this sense, is not unlike choreography or architecture. It gives shape and boundaries—but within those boundaries, anything can happen. And when a piece of writing doesn’t seem to be working, we often suggest switching containers. Take a scene from your memoir and try writing it as a flash fiction piece. Take an internal monologue and turn it into a poem. These shifts don’t always work, but they always teach. They make the writer more responsive to rhythm, more alert to gaps, more willing to experiment.

We see genre not as a test of loyalty, but a way of listening. As Mann puts it, the poem “asks” for something. So does the essay, the scene, the image. Understanding genre gives you the tools to respond. It helps you become a more agile writer—one who can pivot when the material demands it. Because the work always knows more than we do at first. And the more containers you’re comfortable reaching for, the more likely you’ll be able to catch it.

Even when writing “within” a genre, the best work often emerges from that same tension Mann and Jenkinson describe: between freedom and constraint. Writing becomes an act of containment—not confinement. And when the container fits, it doesn’t just hold the work. It enhances it. It makes it sing.

As we remind our students, genre is not a sports team. You don’t have to pick a side. But you do have to pick a form. And ideally, the one that can hold your weirdest, rawest, most demanding obsessions—the ones that won’t leave you alone until you’ve shaped them into something that lasts.

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The Lab, by Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante, is available from WW Norton for pre-order.