Member-only story
And why your career in storytelling will thank you.
It’s a little terrifying to try something new. Doesn’t matter if the new is a story in a field adjacent to that which you’re used to covering or a familiar story in a different and challenging medium. You’ll think you’re doing it wrong. You’ll think you should stop. Stay with what you know.
A lot of storytellers, after all, make a lot of money by doing one thing really well. There are YouTubers who just talk about meal-prep; sportswriters who just cover NBA transactions; fashion bloggers who just write about Gucci. Modern media seems to tell you you should specialize. You tell yourself that, too, because if you specialize you’ll never have to ask yourself that most difficult of questions: What if my suspicions are right and I’m an idiot?
The problem with staying put is that you’re actually sprinting toward extinction. Especially in media in the 21st Century, where platforms rise and just as quickly crumble, the advantage lies with the generalist, the storyteller who expands to new topics and mediums simply because she can, because she’s curious.
This, I suspect, is the real reason David Epstein wrote his great book on the generalist, Range, which nominally concerns why anyone in any field should expand into new domains but, at heart, seems…
