“If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”
—NEIL GAIMAN, FROM THE GRAVEYARD BOOK
Writers walk a fine line between comfort and risk. On the side of comfort are the rules, the formulas, and the known path that helps you chart a course, find an audience, and refine your voice. On the side of risk is everything else. That’s where you walk precariously on a bridge over rough waters, crack open calcified parts of your psyche, tap into universal themes from surprising angles, and do what artists do best (and yes, I consider writers artists): reveal, discover, expose, voice, connect.
But every writer has her comfort zone. You know which territory you’re happiest traveling in, and perhaps you’ve never ventured beyond it. That doesn’t mean it’s the only place you should explore. This chapter is about stretching yourself creatively as well as courageously. A successful writing practice is a brave enterprise, made braver in the face of a culture that often demands you show proof in the form of money or goods. It may take years before you have either wealth or tangible reward to show for your practice, but every day you should do something to expand the boundaries of your practice, widen your circle, and open your net. Every day you have something to show yourself and your muse, and that will count for so much more than you can ever quantify in dollars or units.
Since you may not be the kind of writer who actively pursues risks, the best way to find them is to stay aware of “adventure opportunities” and say yes to them every time. How do you know you are taking a risk? You may feel terror, uncertainty, bewilderment, euphoria, anxiety, or fear of being found out as a fraud.
But don’t run away at the first sign of these feelings. Risks don’t feel “easy.” Easy is rarely a part of the artist’s experience, I’m afraid. Ease is for later, after you’ve taken risks and stretched. Ease is the cool-down period.
Saying yes means staying open. Opportunities might at first seem more like challenges, and thus you may simply pass them by or say no. But saying yes has many, many benefits. For one thing, especially in the case of volunteer efforts, you’re often given access to skills and connections you might not otherwise get. When I was called on to start a volunteer literary radio show for a small local station, I had never been on the air, much less inside a radio station, in my life. I was nervous about whether I could pull off such a thing. But I was drawn to the idea of engaging with writers on my favorite topics. So I took the leap, palms sweating all the way, voices crying “fraud” inside my head.
And there were plenty of shaky moments. My producer created a reel of “outtakes” for my birthday one year, of all the hilarious and frustrating moments when I lost my cool, fumbled a title or an author’s name, or pulled a Casey Kasem and swore a blue streak.
I made no money for my efforts, but I did gain access to the very people I most admired: authors. Well-known, occasionally even New York Times best-selling authors, some of whom came into the studio and sat in front of me. (Others were conducted via “ISDN” line—high-quality digital communication lines that allow conversations between studios to sound as if they are happening in the same studio.) I’ll never forget T.C. Boyle’s robust flyaway hair and his red Converse sneakers, or the way I found Aimee Bender on her back in a yoga pose on the floor when I came in, or the time I sat knee to knee in the back office of a bookstore with Louise Erdrich, whose books were among those that made me want to take up the mantle of a writer as a young girl. Holding the position of interviewer forced me to read critically, to think up interesting questions, and to analyze the craft. It was a mini fiction course in and of itself. I spent hours and hours of my time producing an hour-long show that aired twice a month and probably only reached people within a one hundred-mile radius. And yet it was one of the most profound experiences of my life. It stretched me, connected me to kindred spirits, and taught me a lot. When I later had an opportunity to do book commentaries for KQED Radio for pay, I was able to bring these skills to bear. And besides, beneath the work and the labor, it was fun.
Remember in chapter eight when we talked about going where you are welcome? Opportunities that will stretch you come with a buzzing feeling of possibility tinged with a little fear. Most of the time, fear is good. It’s a fear that will push you to rise above, to shoot for your personal best. But if fear paralyzes you, that’s a different story. In chapter two we talked about your comfort zone and how only you know what you’re willing to risk. You don’t need to take risks that will set you back—only those that will pry open new corners of yourself.
You may balk at an opportunity, thinking you have to be some kind of expert, only to find out that all you need to be is yourself—present and attentive.
When it’s time to say yes to a new opportunity that inspires that thrill of fear, before you say no, remember to turn to your Creative Support Team: Often they can act as a sounding board as you embark on this new step or activity.
I also highly recommend saying yes to opportunities to write in a new way or for a new publication, audience, or blog. Putting your work, or yourself, in front of new eyes always leads to good things. Writers have told me time and time again (and I have experienced it myself as well) that trying out new things, from events to writing opportunities, leads to unexpected bounty in other ways. I’ll say more about this in chapter fifteen, “Consider No Effort Wasted,” but trust me when I say that all the seeds you plant now, no matter how small, will reap some fruit eventually if you keep at your writing practice.
When you’re presented with a new opportunity, consider the following.
If you’re still not convinced you should try new things, consider the biological motivation for taking risks. Columbia scientist Eric Kandel earned the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard) for his discovery that repeated activation, or practice, causes the synapses of the brain to “swell and make stronger connections,” according to John Ratey, M.D. in his book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. In other words, learning something new and then practicing it makes your brain smarter and stronger. And stronger, smarter brains hold up better over time in old age, are more resistant to dementia and Alzheimer’s, and generally retain memories better.
For writers, your brain is your biggest and most important muscle. Sure, you might master something—maybe you can turn out killer romance novels or concise articles on any subject—but doing the same thing again and again leads to mental atrophy and, for many creative types, boredom. Don’t let yourself become bored with your work. You should go deeper into your writing practice the longer you’re at it, which means opening new avenues and exploring new frontiers, be they genres, forms (novel versus memoir), or subjects.
Some writers don’t need to wait for opportunities to say yes; they are instead motivated to go out and create risk for themselves. I love Neil Gaiman’s quote at the beginning of this chapter. There’s nothing wrong with comfort, and there’s no shame in staying safe, but few changes occur within safety. Life is too short to stay the same, don’t you think?
Here’s my first rule of risk taking: Decide where you want to go, or what your goal is, and choose to go after it no matter what “they” or “the rules” say. This doesn’t mean that you should be rude, foolish, or impractical. It means, for instance, that if the general wisdom is something like “Publishers only take agented submissions,” don’t take anybody’s word for it; find out for yourself. Many smaller publishers will actually read unagented submissions, and some big publishers even have small windows of time in which they are specifically open to unagented submissions. Sending an e-mail won’t blackball you from the industry. You have less to lose than to gain. Often these rules are in place to discourage the “masses” who refuse to devote the time and effort to their craft from sending in shoddy work. But you won’t do shoddy work. If you decide to tackle an avenue because you feel it’s right for you, you’ll polish your work until it’s blindingly bright, you’ll do your research, and you’ll leap.
Jonathan Maberry, a prolific and well-loved science fiction and horror writer who is famed for his zombie novels, confirmed this sentiment in a keynote speech he gave at the Central Coast Writers’ Conference in 2011. If one of his pitches was rejected, he would often send it to the same editor under a new title—and have it accepted. His point? “No” is subjective. Timing is everything. And you never know if you don’t keep trying.
As a writer, your forte may be fiction or you may be a freelance journalist. Maybe you’re a memoirist, or perhaps you’re just writing whatever comes out of your mind and you aren’t so worried about labels. In any case, there’s a good chance you focus on one kind of writing more than another. But some comfort zones are good, and some are overly safe. The good comfort zone keeps you from being pushy with agents at conferences and getting sucked in by vanity presses that just want your money. The overly safe comfort zone is a place of boredom, a lackluster realm where your ideas don’t feel interesting and your work doesn’t excite you. The latter is a dangerous place for a writing practice, which needs to keep an edge of mystery and freshness about it. That’s what artists do, after all: They give new voice to the ordinary aspects of life.
You now know that learning new things creates new synapses in the brain, which leads to new ways of thinking and creating—so you have nothing to lose by learning something new. If pride is your issue—say you’ve become so adept at writing fiction that you’re afraid to look like a “newbie” in the realm of personal essay—that’s just the ego trying to exert control over your creative mind. Don’t let it. Stretching into a new form is exciting and exhilarating. You open doors to chests full of hidden riches you didn’t know were there. And the best part is that sometimes what you find in the new form can be applied to your favorite genre or form. For instance, if you have mastered fictional techniques like scene and character development, you have a leg up when working on memoir, because you know how to activate your writing and bring it to life in a way that some memoir writers struggle with.
Or maybe you realize that the truth you discover in a part of your real life can be deftly molded into the weirder world of fiction.
Short story writers learn they have more stamina for writing when they tackle a long-term project such as a novel.
Stuck novelists discover the short story is an excellent way to feel “accomplished” without having to write three hundred pages.
Journalists bring their methodical eye for detail to writing rich, beautiful scenes.
If you haven’t yet experimented with form, you don’t know what you stand to gain and how this might stretch your writing to entirely new cosmos.
Just because you are comfortable or familiar with one way of reaching people doesn’t mean you have to stick to that medium. Many writers who have never tried blogging are surprised to realize that people—strangers—are reading their words. If you’ve only ever been published in newspapers and are on the receiving end of critical complaints or don’t get any feedback at all, making contact with your readers can be a truly heady experience.
Maybe it’s time to try a Tumblr blog, post snapshots of your work on Pinterest or Instagram, or even just create a Facebook author page. People are out there waiting to hear what you have to say, but you have to seek them out.
You might notice that this “Move It” exercise appears before the “Work It” exercise in this chapter when it’s usually the other way around. That’s because doing moderate exercise thirty minutes before you set out to learn something new is shown to improve memory retention and the speed of synapses firing. So before you go on to the “Work It” exercise, get your body moving. “Exercise influences learning directly, at the cellular level, improving the brain’s potential to log in and process new information,” says John Ratey, M.D., co-author of Spark. The good news is that you don’t have to do vigorous exercise to benefit. This chapter suggests you engage in some vigorous stretching.
1. After you’ve stretched, answer each of these questions.
Can you guess where this is going? Give one of these new, scarier forms a try. I recommend you really stretch and go with the fourth entry on your list, but any will do.
2. Try your hand at a short essay. Write a fictional account of a true event. Turn a bad day into a horror story. Take a warm moment and channel it into a poem. But please pick the one that feels a little bit challenging so you leave your comfort zone.