Niching is tired advice
If 'your lane' is actually a multi-lane highway of interests and knowledge, drive all over that mf'er
There’s no shortage of people online who stress the importance of “finding your niche.” And, hot take here, but, I don’t think it’s so much wrong, per se, as much as I strongly believe it misses a seriously fundamental point about art and framing.
Economics will tell us that the more we specialize on one thing, the more efficient we become at it, which translates into less time and money spent producing the good. Which may be super news in a corporate structure who benefits from our labor, but it’s a pretty rotten framing for being human, much less a human who makes any kind of art. But, we have largely internalized that message anyway, and assumed great pressure to be only one thing and have fairly unquestioningly taken on this idea of having singular focus in our creative work, too.
To boil the vastness of your interest, credentials, experience and areas of developed knowledge to one thing is fine if you are only deeply interested and invested in one thing. Which is totally okay if that’s the case.
But, to frame your work around “a niche” is generally about commerce, capitalism, limitation and restraint, whereas to frame your work around your own interest is about cyclically nourishing creative effort. I mean, who actually gives a fuck if an established food writer publishes a non-food essay so long as it’s written and reported well? (The example that’s coming to mind is the gorgeous personal essay about loneliness established business reporter Claire Bushey published in the Financial Times in 2020. It’s beautiful and quickly went viral because it was vulnerable and authentic and we all felt as much.)
There is great pressure, especially in capitalistic societies, to specialize and largely, we have internalized that message. This is so much the case that when we meet a multi-hyphenate person, we’re often astonished, especially if they’re doing any of these things at a high level. (See also: the successful career in comedy that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had before entering politics that nobody would shut up about in the early days of the war with Russia; or the NBA stars who are also established and perfectly credible oenophiles.)
I could (and have, and will continue to) write volumes about this topic, because I find it frustrating that we don’t actively strive to explore as much as we possibly can through our interests? After all, weren’t the greatest thinkers of of ages multi-hyphenates? But, I also think there is something deeper at play:
Humans are excellent at sensing when people are filtering themselves and holding back; we’re also outstanding at connecting to the authenticity in others. Both of those things point to the absolute essential-ness of doing everything we please.
Despite what many Extremely Online thought-leaders with massive audiences might tell us, what if we’re actually more powerful when we do our work according to our interests and pleasures, not according to the limits of what such gurus might suggest? What if expressing ourselves through all the topics and disciplines we choose to take on actually makes our creative work more accessible to our ideal audience because on some level they know and feel we were not limiting ourselves nor holding back?
All that is preamble to say: try on this framing and make a list of topics or activities you are curious about but that possibly don’t fit into whatever niche you’ve defined for yourself as a writer. Consider why might happen if you wrote on those topics anyway. Might your publisher find it harder to sell if you’ve built an empire in another genre? Maybe, but not guaranteed. Might new readers find your byline in new publications and find the rest of your work that way? It’s entirely possible. Might said readers connect with your work more deeply seeing you as a fellow human being with numerous interests and dimensions just like them? And connect deeply to your writing, able to feel the authentic interest and knowledge you poured across your body of work? Absolutely.
So my challenge to you this week is to write something that might feel out of character, out of genre, or off-topic for you, but that you are, nonetheless absolutely able to write credibly and well. Let’s go.