Lessons from Journalism: Stretch Your Limits
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The newsroom was nearly empty the Friday after Thanksgiving. This is the norm, or it was when I was a reporter, because most journalists take that day off. I never did; I loved working in the quiet space, and a day off would have felt like a wasted vacation day. Because working the Friday after Thanksgiving was like a mini vacation, anyway.
Usually.
That particular Friday fell in the middle of a murder investigation in my city. A little girl was reported missing. Eventually they found her body. It’s been years, and the order of events is fuzzy, but the big details remain, as they tend to do.
That Friday, the news editor wanted a reporter to knock on doors in her neighborhood, to talk to people about her, about her family The entire news staff was out, minus an intern, and you don’t sic an intern on that kind of reporting. At least, not solo. You send them with someone who knows what she’s doing. Even if the only person who knows what she’s doing in the entire newsroom is the feature writer with a food column who once blogged about the local woman who was on America's Next Top Model.
Hey, there.
So that was a stretch for me. Another stretch: Attending a graveside birthday party for a child who’d died of a super rare genetic disorder. A movie had just come out about a related disorder, and her mother reached out to the newspaper to see if anyone wanted to write about her daughter, to raise awareness about the condition.
I went into feature writing for lots of reasons, including the fact that I have zero interest in dealing with dead people, police, and politicians. It’s not to say I don’t know how to do these things. But I’d much rather chat with the guy who just opened a new pizza shop and imported his oven from Italy than the neighbor who liked to see the missing little girl ride her bike in the summertime.
Are you seeing the lesson here, writers?
Lesson No. 4: Stretch Your Limits
Yes, my stretches are sad. They’re the stories I’d never seek out. In a newsroom, as a writer, you’re asked to write and do a lot of different things. I may have specialized in feature writing, but sometimes, I had to be a newswriter. Sometimes, I had to be a blogger. Sometimes, I had to attend a firefighter’s funeral for the next day’s issue or interview someone on camera for a brief video of the final Harry Potter movie’s opening.
Every one of those experiences is a tool in the belt, a lesson in humility, brevity, creativity, or even silence. A literary writer, too, needs access to all those tools. A novelist who also writes poetry is a novelist who can make their prose sing, who can give it a hidden rhythm that the reader may not overtly notice, but it helps him zip along, regardless. A horror writer who also writes memoir will understand how to make her horror personal and relatable. She’ll help her readers understand that this impossible scenario might happen to them, and they’ll wonder how they’d react in such a darkly magical situation.
I’m a craft book nerd, and the easiest way I can suggest for writers to dabble in other genres and types of writing is to pick up a book on the topic. ID the completely out-of-your-realm area you want to learn more about, and find a how-to book or three that can walk you through it. Then just start writing. Don’t expect it to be good—that’s not the point. The point is the practice. Revel in your sucktitude. This isn’t work to show anyone. It’s work to try, to learn, to get better.
Another way to try something new: Find a friend who can help. The area I’m looking to try next is songwriting. I don’t know a damn thing about writing a song, which makes it appear mysterious and fun to me. I asked a musician friend recently if he’d help me do this, and how it might go. Apparently, it’s easier to write a tune and then add the music. As a writer, this seems backward to me—wouldn’t the lyrics be more important than the music?—but he’s not the first musician to tell me this. Plus, and this is important, when it comes to songwriting, I do not know what I’m talking about. Not a thing.
Oh, and that’s the fun. It’s fun to be a novice.
Option No. 3 to learn a new creative writerly skill is to sign up for a class. Orgs across the country offer a range of options (ahem, including this one here), from one-off sessions to week- or month-long workshops. You can find classes where the instructor is incredibly involved, providing help and hand-holding, or others where the instructor is more of a facilitator, there to answer questions but ultimately depending on you to do the reading and the work.
So that’s my challenge to you: Find a new writing endeavor, and spend some time learning how to do it. Then watch how that music turns up in your stories, or how the structure of form poetry gives unexpected creative license to your romance, or how that children’s book story showed you a new way to world-build in your next fantasy.