How stepping outside your comfort zone into different genres, styles, or perspectives can improve your writing
Don't Let Your Comfort Zone Smother Your Style
Once someone has been writing for a decent amount of time (over four years is my estimate), it can be tremendously difficult to break them out of their mold: a cozy security blanket of common themes, characters, settings, and plots. Take me for example. I love writing about animals, with animals as the primary characters, or with animals being the sole lens the reader follows the story through. When I see a writing prompt, my mind nine times out of ten pulls my comfort zone blanket over my shoulders and drafts a story involving animals, namely cats and dogs. I have written some short stories and poems in human perspectives and situations, but roughly 65% of my work includes animals in some way, shape, or form.
On November 26th, I took on the challenge of writing a short story completely devoid of animals and entirely from human perspective. This short story has completely changed my thought process and, in my opinion, made me a better writer overall.
A Holistic Approach to Writing
My high school (as most of education is leaning towards today) emphasized a holistic approach to the acquiring of knowledge. Delving into multiple subjects and finding how they all relate ultimately makes you a more well-rounded person. This same approach can and should be taken to writing. I am not saying you should try to learn everything you can about math, science, history, genetics, or biology, but rather that you should force yourself off of one track of thinking. If, for example, all you write about is middle-aged women in Czechoslovakia (though that might be an interesting subject), you should branch out further. Even just taking thirty minutes every month to find and respond to a writing prompt completely different than your comfortable subject can drastically improve your writing. I highly suggest Pinterest as an excellent place to look for writing prompts or simply googling "creative writing prompts."
November 26th
On November 26th, 2018, I embarked on a perilous journey fraught with fear and self-doubt: I wrote outside my comfort zone. Once you have established a comfort zone with writing (animals for me), it is surprisingly difficult to step outside the line. The short story I was attempting to write was for the Owl Canyon Press Hackathon (grand prize of $3000, which is very tempting to a college student). The challenge with this contest is that the judges give you the 1st and 25th paragraphs (two alternatives for the 25th), and you fill in the other 48. This contest helped me become a better writer overall for two reasons: learning how to pace my writing, and stepping outside my comfort zone.
A challenge like this forces you to pace your story-telling, the development of your characters, and your plot until it matches up exactly with that 25th paragraph. You absolutely must have a plan of how you are getting to that middle paragraph otherwise you will flounder and struggle on blank paper to make it match up. Also, you have to constrain your voice and style. If you generally write in fast-paced action with short lines of dialogue, you have to slap yourself on the wrist and don't. This contest, and others like it ,presumably, require each paragraph to be at least forty words long and dialogue to be contained in the paragraph, which eliminates traditional back and forth dialogue. You also have to be wary of deviating too far from the style and tone of the 1st and 25th paragraphs, otherwise that 25th paragraph will completely break up the flow of the short story.
Stepping outside my comfort zone was frustrating but exciting. To make this transition from animals to humans, I started with one character. One boy, Matty, who had just lost his sister and was desperate for justice. I began and ended the short story with him; Matty guided me throughout the entire piece as I stepped into his brain to find out his dreams, fears, and motivations, and he stepped into mine. I think having an anchor point or anchor character is essential to making this transition to stepping outside your comfort zone. Maybe you are familiar with writing about single mothers. Build one of your characters or settings from something familiar to you, and then you can branch out from there.
I wrote the entire short story in about 16 hours, spread over two days. I wrote in every spare minute I had between classes, homework, and meetings, staying up until midnight the last night. I was determined to finish before the 29th so that I had plenty of time to edit and send to peers to edit (and catch up on all the homework I pushed to the last minute to finish it). This brings up another point about stepping outside your comfort zone: find someone to cheer you on. Whether it is your mom, friend, creative writing group, professors, or even dog (you can read aloud to him/her), you need someone to read it and tell you what is working and what is maybe not, especially when you might be writing in a different genre or style with a different audience. This goes for any of your writing. Writing does not have to be a solitary process.
Writing this short story was a painful but exhilarating process. I learned more about myself and my abilities as a writer and gained exciting insight into what I could be capable of in the future. Finishing this short story was an accomplishment in that I could enter the contest, but I also pushed myself outside my comfort zone and loved the process. When I finished, I put on Earth, Wind & Fire's "Let's Groove" and fist-pumped the air.
How You Can Get Your Own November 26th
How can you find a way to break free from your comfort zone and improve as a writer as I did? One way, of course, comes from doing exactly what I did: forcing yourself to respond to a prompt completely different from your normal style. Another way is to free-write. You can find a random word generator or prompt generator and go for it. However you choose to do it, find three random things: character, situation, and setting, and write.
Also, just be open-minded. Have the confidence in yourself and your passion for writing to get outside your comfort zone and crank out some incredible writing.
Need More Reasons to Write Outside Your Comfort Zone?
Writer E.M. Welsh compiled a list of three reasons why you should write outside your comfort zone:
1. To keep your work from plateauing
2. To force you to see story-telling in a different way
3. To perceive your writer's voice faster
Note: I mentioned writing short stories in this post, but you can step outside your comfort zone in a variety of ways and mediums such as poetry, flash fiction, prose poetry, experimental writing, etc.
As always, thank you for continuing to follow this blog.
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