Swim Another Lane: Why You Should Write Outside Your Comfort Zone

"Experimentation can lead to tangible gain."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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You know who once held the record for the longest televised putt in golf history? Not Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus, but Michael Phelps. You know, the swimmer. Phelps, not content with being the most awarded Olympian in history, drilled a shot 159 feet into the hole like it was nothing. The ball flowing like endless cream to its destination.

No, you haven’t stumbled onto a sports blog. I share the story because it illustrates the value of — forgive the pun — swimming outside your lane. As writers, we’re told to put our nose to the grindstone, write every day and finish each project you start. Implicit in those commandments is the idea that you should find your narrow alleyway of expertise or passion and never deviate. After all, Stephen King is the Master of Horror and horror alone, right? And Hemingway wrote spare literary epics, nothing else.

Not quite: King’s dabbled in fantasy, craft memoirs, crime fiction and even a children’s book. Hemingway is one of many feted writers who churned out Great American Novels while working as a journalist. As more than one academic has pointed out, Hem’s crisp, minimalist style would not have existed without his newspaper days, where every column-inch counts. That’s why his words come out like cream, rich and simple. He swam in two lanes.

At this point it might be valuable to try a little experiment and fill in the blank: I am a _____ writer. Answer quickly, without thinking. What goes in the space? How do you self-identify? As a flash fiction writer, a serious writer, a CNF writer?

My thesis is this: there is value in broadening how you define your craft. Every new genre or form can school us in what we see as our “true” calling, and enrich it. When I joined my MA program for Creative Writing, I was a staunch anti-poet. Couldn’t see the point in it; all that spare, high-minded opacity. I was a Short Story Writer dammit, could spare no time for stanzas. But I needed to complete the poetry semester to pass. Spoiler alert, I now adore the form. It’s taught me to be brutal with word choice and concrete imagery, hammered home the value of understatement. Reading about William Carlos Williams’ “plums that were in the icebox […] / so sweet and so cold” was a revelation. Here was a rich tableaux of yearning and place, short as a tweet but achingly powerful.

In the job market there’s a phrase beloved by suits: transferable skills. It applies to the arts too. The better I got at poetry, the more vivid my stories and essays became. I have since written 200 poems, whole megabytes of them complete garbage fires, but each one a stepping stone. For better or worse, poems come quickly to me, which means I can look back at things penned just months ago and say, I am better now.

Trying your hand at another style or sub-genre might be a challenge. You’ll face what author Steven Presffield calls Resistance, the pernicious voice that tells you not to risk new things, friend, you’ll only fail. Soothe yourself by understanding that even your heroes have felt this way. Margaret Atwood’s magnum opus? She did not want to write it. Not at first. The Handmaid’s Tale was a leap for her into an intimidating space. “It seemed to me a risky venture,” she explained in The New York Times in 2017. “I’d read extensively in science fiction, speculative fiction, utopias and dystopias ever since my high school years in the 1950s, but I’d never written such a book. Was I up to it?”

As Atwood can tell us, apart from mere personal growth, experimentation can lead to tangible gain. Earlier this year, three pieces I originally wrote as verse poetry were floundering. I’d submitted them to several journals to no avail. But the imagery was strong, and I didn’t want to abandon them. So I tinkered under the hood, added some connective tissue and sent them, now as a set of micro prose, to X-R-A-Y, who were kind enough to publish the set. Lesson learned: sometimes a piece isn’t working because it wants to wear a different hat.

Switching genres can also help you shift gears when burn-out is on the horizon. If you’re stuck on a short story, messing around with, say, a haiku keeps the creative juices flowing, and can feel thrillingly low-stakes. “Just playing around here,” you say, and ten minutes in you discover a climactic image that unlocks your janky story. And even if it doesn’t, you might end up with a sweet little haiku to share with a journal you’d never dreamed of approaching. Your horizons broaden, and with them your potential to publish.

Looking for a welcoming place to start sending poems? In an industry plagued by mushrooming submission fees and slow response times, I cannot recommend Rattle enough. Each month they feature poetry prompts, ekphrastic challenges, plus a section where you can submit a poem in response to a news story and hear back within days. Not one of my Rattlers has been accepted, but just knowing that more often than not, I have a submission thrumming away in-queue means I feel productive. Things are happening, even while I sleep.

True, the whisper-voice of Resistance will say that submissions from your ‘new’ genre are thin-legged foals, unlikely to make it to print. But you can whisper back: sometimes if you’re too familiar with a literary style or trend, you write what everyone else is writing. Sometimes the foal is fresh. Searching through interviews with journal editors of all stripes, I was surprised by how many answered the question “What makes you accept a piece?” in the same way. They used words like raw, unusual, surprising. At a time when even smaller journals are swarmed by thousands of submissions, you can practically hear editors begging: Send us something different. Often that freshness comes from being unencumbered by The Rules, whether that’s shelving a three-act structure, likeable characters or the stuffy conventions of a sonnet.

Conversely, learning the ropes and expectations, particularly of genre fiction, can also be immensely helpful. Try your hand at a detective story and you’ll see why Agatha Christie is dubbed a genius. Creating a mystery with a believable but unexpected ending that leaves you satisfied? That’s Gandalf-level writing. Even if you fail, maybe you can fold a pinch of that genre convention into an unexpected space. Could your lyric essay about being bullied as a child be re-spun as a whodunnit? Perhaps, perhaps…

How else might you branch out? I found writing craft essays or reviews to be a gamechanger, offering invaluable perspective. If you can set down in detail what makes someone else’s story fly or flop, you begin to spotlight your own flaws. (My biggest literary peeve: pretentious over-writing. My most common mistake: pretentious ov- yeah, you get the picture. But poem by poem, I force myself to do less. I am learning to let words drive themselves, like a putt trickling toward the hole.)

“A critic,” Channing Pollock once said, “is a legless man who teaches running.” You know who Channing Pollock was? A critic — who also wrote his own plays, songs and a memoir. Pollock knew the value of branching out. A critic’s POV can give a story legs.

If penning a multi-page review feels too formal, join a literary mag as a submissions reader. (I can recommend the team at december, who are exactly the kind of warm, passionate word-geeks you want scrutinizing your work. Every submission response, even a rejection, is accompanied by reader notes and comments.) Confronted by dozens of submissions when there’s only space for a 64 pages underscores how high a caliber your own writing needs to be. It’s like being a third-act Neo — you start to see how the Matrix works. The majority of lit mag submissions are solid, well-crafted stories, but you want to serve the reader by offering them something worth their time. Something that lingers in the mind like a sweet fever.

The result is that the next time an editor says “Your piece was good, but didn’t quite make the cut,” you understand what they mean. The sting leaches out of the rejection.

Speaking of things that linger: something the late great Anthony Bourdain wrote has stuck with me. (Incidentally he swam outside his lane too, crafting travel essays, fiction, wit-filled cookbooks and a graphic novel). These lines, from his memoir Kitchen Confidential, are worth quoting in full.

Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed Popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.

You see where I’m going with this. Write without fear, tear into sonnets and CNF, the mystery meat of sci-fi or a one-act play. Try everything once.

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