#write anything
He closed the blinds, cutting off his nosy neighbor’s view.
Why You Should Read Outside of Your Comfort Zones
Writers read to expand their knowledge on different writing styles and patterns of other writers, established or not. It has been a constant reminder to writers to keep reading and reading something does not necessarily mean it has to be finished.
I can no longer remember the very first time I picked up a book and just sat down and read but I do remember the complete set of colorful picture storybooks my parents bought for me when I was a child. Those were my first books.
My love for reading continued when I was in elementary. I was not a very outgoing child so I spent my time alone in the library, flipping though books with pictures. I eventually learned to love books without the colorful pictures when I read the Harry Potter series. That was my very first set of young adult fiction books.
As the years passed, I started to read more fiction books that young teenage girls read, like The Mediator series from Meg Cabot, the Mates Dates series from Cathy Hopkins, and the Year Abroad trilogy.
I noticed that once I like a book with a certain theme, I tend to search for other books with the similar theme.
Is Reading Books You’re Comfortable With Enough?
Is reading the same genre of books enough to help one develop as a writer? Wouldn’t that just limit the writer to write something similar?
It’s not limited to genres either. How about just reading short stories and novels, but never really paying attention to other forms of literature like poems, prose, or plays?
I have to admit that I was never really a poetry fan and I am very limited to a handful of novel authors. After reading a post here about collecting images for poetry (and for stories as well), I realized that I haven’t really explored other forms of literature and other genres that I stay away from.
We all have our comfort zones, in reading, writing and in our lives. Without stepping out of that small bubble of ours, our knowledge would not be able to grow and we would not know if we might be better in other fields of writing or not.
Realizations are one thing, but acting upon a realization is another.
I may not be able to write poems with measures and rhymes just yet, but I’ve decided to start reading more poems, analyze and criticize them without bias and eventually write some before completely scrapping it out of my writing experience.
Now, this prompt may be more outside of some people’s comfort zones than others (looking at fanfics here mkay) but even if this is something you’ve done before feel to indulge once more.
Think of your favorite story (book, movie, whatever). Got it? Now, write a scene with the main characters (and supporting characters for major kudos) as gender-swapped.
What scares you the most? What phobias do you have? What scares you in real life, and what scares you about writing?
There’s your challenge. Write your worst fears.
“Did I ever tell you about that time I started a cult?”
“My mind starves for something other than here.”
“Congratulations on finally graduating kindergarten.”
Three Ways Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone Can Boost Your Freelance Career
Most of us like to be comfortable. It’s only natural. However, the reality is that most growth doesn’t take place in your comfort zone. Instead, if you want to grow and improve, you need to get out of your comfort zone. This applies to writing as well as to other areas of your life.
If you want to be a better writer, and improve your freelance career, you need to get out of your comfort zone with your writing. Here are three ways that writing outside you comfort zone can help your freelance career:
1. Learn Something New
I’m very comfortable in the personal finance niche. I ended up specializing in financial topics, and it’s been amazing. And, while I know that there’s plenty left for me to learn in terms of finances, the truth is that there isn’t a whole lot that surprises me in the course of my writing.
Getting out of my writing comfort zone can help me learn something new. The research required when I write something outside my comfortable financial niche practically guarantees that I will learn something new. Not only that, but I think I become a better writer as a result. I might see a different side to something, or find something that allows me to look at personal finances in a new light.
It’s more work to research something outside your comfort zone, but it’s usually worth it to learn something new. Constant learning improves your ability to adapt, and comes with a number of benefits to your life as well as to your freelance career.
2. Stretch Your Creativity
It really takes me outside my comfort zone to write fiction. Even if I don’t share what I write with others, it stretches my creativity to write fiction. I’ve been thinking about it a little bit more recently, since it’s National Novel Writing Month. Even though I’m not participating in NaNoWriMo this year, I’ve done it in the past, and I’m still using this month to refine some of my fiction writing.
I’m not very creative, but stretching those creative muscles forces me to be a better writer. That creativity can add something to my nonfiction writing, and improve my ability to tell a story. At least, that’s what I hope is happening. My ability to write creatively can open up new opportunities in my freelance career, as well as keep me open to new possibilities.
Writing outside your comfort zone forces you to be more creative and that can influence the rest of your writing career for the better.
3. Potential to Find New Clients
You might even land new clients when you write outside your comfort zone. The truth is that I didn’t start out writing about finances. My first gigs were mainly science writing, and I tried to write about religion and politics. One day I was asked to write for a money blog. I wasn’t entirely sure I could do it, but I said yes, and the rest is history.
Getting outside your comfort zone can encourage you to learn a new style of writing, and it can also introduce you to new markets. Your freelance career can get a boost with the help of your willingness to move beyond what you’re wholly comfortable with.
While I think that most of my writing will likely center on the financial niche on into the foreseeable future, keeping my options open can be a good idea, since it helps to maintain diversity so that you aren’t relying on any one niche, or even any one product or service. Even though it’s out of my comfort zone, I’ve started offering additional services with my business, from running blogger campaigns to presenting workshops.
When you are willing to step outside your comfort zone, and write what you’re not completely comfortable with, you have better chances to enhance your freelance career now, and safeguard an income for the future.
When people meet me for the first time, they usually find out within the first ten minutes that I love to write. The question that proceeds right after is, “What do you write?” At that point, I’m stumped. The thing is, I write a little bit of everything – memoir, flash fiction, news articles and feature stories, to name a few. As a writer, I don’t stick to a single genre or style. I never have.
Branching Out
I got my first diary, a red Hello Kitty notebook with a matching lock, when I was about seven years old. My handwriting was horrendous back then, and there wasn’t much to say except perhaps what my mother made for dinner and which games the kids played at recess. But I still wrote nearly every day.
My first fiction story, which I wrote a couple years later, was 60 pages long and followed the bond between a young girl and a horse she saves from animal cruelty. The writing was flat, and the premise was strangely similar (okay, identical) to the story of Felicity Merriman, my favorite American Girl Doll at the time. But I still cried when the story got deleted one day with a single click of the wrong button.
Throughout my childhood, I continued to write short stories and even created a neighborhood newsletter called The Weekly Reader – sounds original, right? – because I wanted to be just like The Pickwick Club from Little Women. It didn’t last long, but here I am, one decade later, a student journalist who writes for campus magazines and the local newspaper.
I’m a journalist who writes news articles on tight deadlines and scribbles poetry in the margins of her reporter’s notebook and submits fiction or memoir shorts to literary magazines. I’ve written horror, contemporary romance and erotica because I like the challenge. The answer to the question, “What do you write?” is, “Whatever I feel like, plus anything I haven’t tried before.” As long as I’m doing some form of literary storytelling, I’m happy.
Fitting In
Some people might say it’s important for writers to specialize in a certain category like young adult, or stick to just one genre like mystery or sci-fi. It becomes your targeted market for future work. Your time can be devoted to this one niche instead of getting wasted on your dabbling in other irrelevant areas. Certainly a novelist can’t be a good lyricist, too!
There is some merit to this rationale: You practice writing humorous pieces and you eventually become the Jim Carrey of literature (oops, wait, that’s John Green). You construct a thousand different ways two or three people can fall in love with each other, and Nicholas Sparks gives you a run for your money. You become not only a knowledgeable expert of the topic, but you become better at writing about it over time.
But this “hyper-specialization” also narrows your choices of what you can write and hinders your ability to discover worlds beyond the one you’re writing in. Every time you start on a new project, it takes a little bit more effort to think of something new that fits with your bailiwick. Beliefs like “I only write chick-lit” or “I’ve never written fantasy in my life, and I don’t think I could start now!” become reinforced. It’s only when you start exploring that you become exposed to possibilities – a potential interest or knack – that you might otherwise not have found.
Quit Boxing Around
Writing outside of your comfort zone doesn’t necessarily mean you have to “think outside the box,” because the rules of a box, or whatever your usual genre or style is, no longer apply. You don’t think outside a box because there is no longer a box – it’s a tunnel, or a cylinder, or a cone. It means you become a more creative and daring writer. Soon, you learn to incorporate several different elements together for a much richer piece of writing. Many of my favorite novels do this: The Lovely Bones, for example, has elements of romance, paranormal, horror and family tragedy all woven in a single beautiful book. When you write outside your comfort zone, you’re no longer categorized as a young adult novelist or a mystery writer. You’re a storyteller.
By experimenting with different styles of writing, you also improve at the craft. If you write poetry, you know how to condense a lot of meaning into a small amount of words. You pick words carefully, because each one counts toward the flow of things. Not just in the symbolism, but in sound. Syllables matter. If you write narratives, you know how to knit sentences together that make sense structurally. If you write a lot of both, you know how to create stories with vivid imagery using the rhythm of words. Essentially, you’re Michael Ondaatje.
Over time, you become multi-talented and capable of working on several different projects. When I first started writing feature articles, I struggled. I’d been trained to write either with a creative mind or with a strict formula for presenting hard news facts, never both skill sets at once. Feature articles are in-depth human-interest stories that focus on people, the things that happen to them and how they’ve changed as a result. By nature, feature articles use creative storytelling to present facts or the subjects’ interpretation of facts. By writing several feature stories, I became a better journalist and a better creative writer. Now, I use the same techniques for memoir writing, which must also rely on colorful human memories to recall true events.
If you’re used to writing within a particular genre, it can be scary to suddenly switch to something new. That’s why it is helpful to stick with familiar territory at the same time if you can. During the last few months, I experimented a lot with poetry. But because I’m used to writing romance, I wrote a lot of love poems. Unlike the awful angst-ridden poetry I wrote in sixth grade, these poems actually turned out, well, pretty. They sounded pretty when I read them out loud, and they resonated with the few people who read them. I call that a success.
Choosing to write outside of your comfort zone is the first step. The next step? Just write whatever comes to mind. That’s usually how the magic happens.
“I can tell. You’re wincing.”
“I left and pretended to never look back.”
“I left and pretended to never look back.”
“Is this one of those times when you want me to lie to protect your delicate emotions?”
Take a look at yesterday’s writing tip (August 9th). Now, take what you’ve learned, and write a story whose main & supporting characters come from a different culture than yours. Do your research, and come up with something great.
“She isn’t who she says she is. She’s actually a lot more badass.”
One of the most common questions that comes up around diversity is the issue of “Who can write what”—whether an author of one race can create a character of another, whether that character is then authentic, who gets to decide all this. When I’ve considered these situations as an editor, my judgment almost always starts with how much that writer is willing and able to radically decenter himself and his own privileges and biases in favor of those of his fictional character and culture, rendered in all its lights and shades … which also presupposes the writer has done enough research or gained enough experience with that culture to render the lights and shades authentically.
As an example, let’s suppose I just finished reading a manuscript written by a white woman but told from a Mexican-American teenage boy’s perspective, and overall, I liked the manuscript: I found the characters involving and multi-dimensional, the plot was fresh and smart and kept me turning the pages, the themes were woven deeply into the story and thought-provoking — and all of that would incline me toward acquiring it. But as a person who thinks a lot about diversity issues, I would at that point pause a moment and ask myself: Did the voice sound believable to me as that of a Mexican-American teenager, given the character and the world the author created around him? (Here I have to acknowledge that I myself am a white woman, and keep an eye on my own privileges, biases, and knowledge/lack thereof.)
How is Mexican-American culture as a whole portrayed within the book, and how are other cultures portrayed in contrast? Is any set of people all cartoonishly bad or uniformly good? (Sentimentality about a culture, and particularly about America’s or white people’s ability to help a “lesser” culture, can be just as offensive as ignorance of it.) Who drives the action and makes real change in the story? Is everyone portrayed with some complexity? (I should further specify that this concerns me most when a writer is writing about a protagonist or setting the book as a whole in a culture different from his/her own; multicultural secondary characters need to be believable and authentic too, but if we’re not so much seeing the whole world around them, the standards are a bit different.)
Supposing the book passed those tests, I’d then ask if I could have a phone conversation with the author. This is a standard part of my acquisitions process before I sign up a book, but it’s especially important when I’m talking with someone who’s writing cross-culturally. In that case, I say outright: “This is a tricky and sensitive subject. What led you to write this story, or to write the story from this perspective? What do you know about this culture? What’s the basis of your authority? What sort of research or interviews or experience have you accumulated? Has anyone from within the culture read it, and what sort of feedback did you receive?”
In the author’s responses, I’d listen for:
- Humility in the face of the above issues
- Thoughtfulness about them
- An openness to critique
- Not just by me, but by any vetters we might employ
- A willingness to work
- To go as far as she can in learning more about the culture and to revise to correct any missteps
- An openness to dialogue
- Being able to talk about these questions with me and with others as they come up
If these things are present, then I might go on and share the book with my colleagues here at Scholastic, and we’d figure out the next steps from there.
“The summer sun was not meant for girls like me. Girls like me belonged to the rain.”
“This isn’t justice- it’s a massacre.”
Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone
A friend, Colin Mulhern, who writes gritty contemporary YA fiction, posted in a Facebook group of writers: “I’ve got one idea that’s been bouncing around for a while, but it’s just a bit… predictable. I read a novel right out of my comfort zone while I was away, and loved it.” What did we all think about writing outside one’s comfort zone? A Good thing, or a Bad one?
Some would say Good as a point of principle. Those who have to pay the rent with their writing would say Bad, since the risk is you’ll produce something you can’t sell. Since it’s riskier, a publisher would also say Bad: both might follow with But Maybe Good, when they’ve remembered that, actually, the most successful books do tend to be the ones which no one was sure would work (so too are the most unsuccessful ones, of course). Can you afford to take that risk with your writing time, if not your income? Can you afford not to, if your creative self is going to stay alive? What’s a writer to do?
It can be astonishingly fruitful to force yourself outside your defaults: it leads to you writing things you’d never have written and it asks you to practice skills you’ve never worked with before. But what if your first tries are wonky ducks? Rent has to be paid, and writing time is in short supply for most of us. You need to think about where the Un-Comfort Zone is which you’re thinking of travelling to.
A subject/setting/topic which you’re not comfortable with: “uncomfortable” in that it’s unfamiliar and you can’t draw on detailed knowledge and experience. It’s not “writing what you know” in the fundamental sense, and that means a leap of imagination.
Or are the actual places and events potentially distressing? There are obvious ones that most of us have to take a deep breath for - war, abused children, cruelty. (And I don’t know about you, but some writers do seem to reach too easily for these, as lazy way of making a story matter) But we all, also, have our own particular triggers, both emotional and material. I do think that it’s very hard to write a story which will really affect readers if you don’t work with material which is potent for you, but that doesn’t mean that you’re morally obliged to work with your phobias. Something which is so much your nightmare that you’ll keep pulling back and not letting your imagination go all the way: unconsciously you’ll keep slipping into Fortunately-Unfortunately-But-Solved, because you need to dilute it. That’s not going to work as well as something which you do feel brave enough to imagine fully.
A genre which you don’t read. This can be very exciting, if you’re tackling it because it excites you, not from sheer cynicism because it will sell. Some of the best crime-writers of recent years - Kate Atkinson, Susan Hill - have come from non-crime, for example. And I recently wrote my first-ever horror story, for Dreams of Shadow and Smoke, a collection to celebrate the bicentenary of J S LeFanu which is published in August. I don’t often read that kind of thing, and I had to read LeFanu with a very sharp eye to find a way my voice and with my writerly sensibility could be used to work with that kind of story.
A form or structure which you haven’t worked with. Form so often follows function, and your new idea turns out to be taking a shape which you haven’t made before. That’s great, and of course it would be a mistake to force it back into something more familiar. But what if you can’t handle it? Looking for others who’ve done it before should help you to think, but don’t force yours into their structure: find the solution that’s right for your story.
A technical thing you haven’t done before. Again, each project makes new technical demands, and if you’re away from your usual ground, that’s going to be even more often the case. Some are relatively small, and just take a bit of practice, like running in the engine of a car. But what if you want to use an external narrator, with a moving point of view, when you’ve always written in a character’s voice? All sorts of changes will flow from that big decision.
A process you haven’t used before. If you’re doing a writing course maybe you can’t write the whole shitty first draft, because it’s daft not to do some basic editing before you submit your work? Are you a polish-as-you-go writer, but you’ve only got till the baby’s born to get this first draft finished, come what may? Writing out-of-order because you can’t do the main chunk of research till next year? All of these changes may have surprising effects on how the draft comes out.
The obvious answer is not to land yourself in doing too many things you haven’t done before, all at once. If you’re working with too many new things it’s horribly easy to lose your bearings and then your judgement about what’s working and what isn’t. But one new anti-default may lead to the other: decisions about topic lead to decisions about structure, tackling horrors needing a different kind of narrator. I don’t have a simple answer. But here are a some thoughts:
- Embrace the opportunity to learn to write what you don’t know as if you do know it. As long as you’re willing to put in the work on the imagining, the research, and the writing, so that you can make us believe you know it, this is one of the best and most fundamental ways of becoming a better writer.
- Remember that stepping outside your comfort zone isn’t a moral obligation, nor meritorious in itself. It’s only worth doing if the story or your writerly growth, or your sales, will be the better for it.
- If you think you need a new technique, step away from the draft and set yourself a little challenge of a separate short story, purely to practice it. Make your wonky ducks there, then come back to the book.
- If you think you need a new form, read in and around successful books which do the kind of thing you’re contemplating. Think about if and how they work. Then put them away, forget them, and work out your own way.
- If you want to try a new genre, get to grips with the opportunities, boundaries and conventions of the genre by reading strategically, exploring the range of possibilities. What is it that makes travel writing work or not, or a detective story satisfy, or a literary novel transcend expectations?
- If you’re using a new process, stay alert to the ways in which it affects what you do. Can you exploit the good effects, and minimise the bad?
- Finally, forgive yourself if the story comes out differently from how you suspect it would have on your old ground. If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. And you never know: the very fact that you’re coming to this new, from outside, might mean it comes out better.
What gender is your main character in your WIP? What is the gender of the main character in most of your works? Try broadening your horizons.
This could mean that if you’re used to writing men, then you should write women, and vice versa, but I want you to go broader than that. Gender means a lot of different things to different people. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, well, you have your research cut out for you.
Write about someone who is a different gender, different sexual orientation, etc. than your norm. Only you can know what your norm is, so only you can know what would be a challenge for you. But I do encourage you to challenge yourself. You might just learn a little something along the way.
What writing genre are you most comfortable with? Historic fiction? Sci-Fi? Fantasy? Drama? Crime? These are all really broad (and not even close to a complete list), but I want you to think really hard about your writing and figure out what you’re most comfortable with.
Got it? Good. Now pick a different one. A very, very different one. Are you comfortable writing sci-fi? Try out some historical fiction. Used to fantasy? Try out a crime story.
You get the idea. I want you to try and stray as far as possible away from your comfort zone. Try out a few different genres all over the spectrum. People could argue that you could have a sci-fi historical novel, or a crime story based in a fantasy world, but that’s not what I want. Maybe this exercise will give you an idea for a story like that, which is awesome. But for now, I want you to completely step away from your comfort genre.
Sound good? Go and give it a try.
