Up: [[Creating a Body of Work]] Related: [[Life Writing]] Created: 2024-04-15 Updated: 2025-12-28 > [!Orbit] David Shields > Genre is a minimum-security prison. Once we say that our writing or our art is of a certain genre or style, say an essay or a portrait, it’s frequently a next step, often a subconscious one, to believe that we need to follow the rules of that form. But if we can try to create without labelling prematurely, we may find that all sorts of interesting possibilities open up. An interesting example is the Canadian author, [Sheila Heti](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thenextchapter/it-was-a-desire-to-look-at-my-life-sheila-heti-transformed-decades-old-diary-entries-into-her-latest-novel-1.7110749). She took ten years of diaries, 500,000 words, and sorted sentences alphabetically in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Then she wrote a book called *Alphabetical Diaries*. Sorting ten years of her life alphabetically helped Heti see patterns in her life that she says she wouldn’t have seen in any other way.