This weekend my friend Sylvia and I went to our friend Annie’s house to see her short film. She’s not a trained filmmaker. In fact, the three of us are fiction writers, and that’s how we first met, but since then we’ve become devoted hiking partners and dog mom friends and just plain dear friends, as well as writers who support each other. But none of us is only a fiction writer. I’m an editor/writer, Sylvia a science teacher/writer, and Annie a visual artist/writer who taught herself animation and the digital manipulation of text and then made this film that Sylvia and I had come to see.
It was a moving, powerful, and enormously innovative account of growing up in a big Lebanese family as a girl who doesn’t always feel like a girl, a person who might have been more comfortable as a boy. There is often one story that forms the core of most writers’ work, and Annie’s has been this: a girl who feels uncomfortable in her own skin chafes against her overbearing mother. For years, Annie has been working on this story in various forms— short story, book, and now film— and on Friday night, I was moved and impressed to see that she’d taught herself to merge her own text and drawings and certain photos to great effect. It would not have been the same story only on the page or only in pictures, and as a visual artist/writer, she had created a new form that reflected her multiple talents. But it also perfectly communicated the heart of the story, and the story of this character’s heart (forgive the schmaltz) in a way I’d not seen before.
The three of us talk a lot about publishing and creativity on our dog hikes, about how to stay focused on the joyful parts of the processes and how to endure the depleting parts. More and more, we’ve been talking about trying new things, especially in the context of animation and graphic novels (Annie) and Substack (me) and memoir (Sylvia and me) and digital-only publication (me). The latter I’ve explored as an editor in my work with Amazon Original Stories, where I commission and edit short fiction for Plympton. It’s been gratifying to see short stories given their due, the attention and respect I feel they deserve. This doesn’t always happen in book publishing. Tell your agent you have a short story collection to sell and odds are the agent will ask if there’s a novel coming next. In my work with Plympton, I’ve gotten to edit a far larger swath of writing than I’d done previously in my life as a literary editor. I’ve worked on young adult fiction, memoir, thrillers and mysteries, speculative fiction, women’s fiction. I’ve worked with writers as different as Margaret Atwood, Rainbow Rowell, Jeff VanderMeer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Janelle Brown, Ken Liu, Gayle Forman, B.A. Paris, Catherine Steadman, and Carmen Maria Machado. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoy editing work that focuses solely on plot, or futurism, horror, history, courtroom drama, forensics, or fairy tales.
I’ve come to understand how important it is for each new creative project, whether a writing or work project, to feel just that: new. I’ve also come to understand how unnerving newness is, how daunting. When we learn to write, we learn rules, processes, and solutions to problems that we expect to gather into our arsenal and use again and again. The problem is this: if a writer knows too much either about the story or the process, roteness sets in. Emotion and interest are contagious, and if the artist feels no sense of adventure or urgency on starting a new piece, it’s likely that the reader won’t either.
Newness is not just good for your readers or your art, of course. Studies have shown that learning new things improves your cognitive abilities (like attention span and working memory). This is especially important as we grow older and embark on subsequent projects. Newness can come in the form of form, as with Annie’s film, or subject matter or length of work or genre, really anything at all. Sometimes a simple change in perspective— writing in the first person after only writing in the tight third person— is all that is required to step outside your comfort zone. It’s always possible to return to an earlier draft after a failed experiment. Any working writer knows what a massive part of the process revision occupies. They also know that without risk comes stagnation, the antithesis of creation.