Stepping out of your comfort zone

There are plenty of things that get me sweating, like sending out my book for the first time to a publisher or sitting down to speed-pitch agents at a conference. It’s sometimes hard to take the first step and the task often filled with nerves, but afterward, a special kind of growth happens when going out of our comfort zone to try something new.

I think it’s important from a growth perspective to try new things, and sometimes that means stepping away from something I feel comfortable doing, like trying to write in a new genre or trying out a new writing style. For some, that hard-to-write thing can be a love scene. For others, a physical fight scene. For me, it’s when I’m writing about bullying, sexual harassment, or assault. Not because I find them hard to envision, but because I get angry that I can’t plunk myself into the story and protect whoever is at the receiving end.

But writing outside of my comfort zone, however much my anger churned, taught me more about my own craft. And the more I knew, the more I was able to keep my anger from interfering with the writing. The emotion was still there, but it wasn’t interrupting my craft.

Although, hard as it can be, my most difficult challenge was trying to write my first short story. And for entirely different reasons.

A short story is something I never thought I’d do. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t believe I’d be any good at it. This may partly be due to imposter syndrome, but it also comes from the knowledge that short sorties are difficult to pull off. I had never written one, but I listen to plenty of podcasts where they discuss the craft and difficulties of short story writing.

When my agent told me Audible was looking for submissions to one of their short story collections, he asked if I was interested. With nothing on the laptop’s hard drive even coming close to a seven-hundred-something-word story, any submission would have to be written from scratch. And fast. They needed the submission yesterday.

The problem wasn’t coming up with ideas or even sticking to the desired length. The trouble was in my head—to step out of my comfort zone. I had to put aside the doubt and give myself a chance to grow as an author. What if I love writing short stories? What if I had a knack for it? All questions I wouldn’t get an answer to unless I put aside the doubt and wrote the damn thing.

Well, I tried it, and I’m glad I did. Not only did I prove to myself that I could write a short story, but my agent and I also proved we could sell it.

I was honored to have El Sombrerón become part of a collection of short stories. But even if it hadn’t been picked up, the best reward from my experience was to prove to that doubting voice inside my head it’s worth it sometimes to step away from what I’m comfortable with, worth taking risks, and worth learning more ways than one to present my craft. Because who knows? I might love what I discover.