6 Risks Every Writer Should Take

Last Updated on May 28, 2020 by Nathaniel Tower

Are you playing it too safe as a writer? Writing isn’t meant to be easy. Some of the greatest works of writing come from a place of risk.

Taking risks as a writer can help you become a better writer. It can also help you break out of a writing funk.

Here are 6 risks every writer should take at some point in their career:

Write something that makes you feel uncomfortable

Not everything you write should make you feel good. You have to be willing to get out of your comfort zone. This can be accomplished in a few different ways:

• Write about a topic that makes you feel uncomfortable
• Write something that is deeply personal and difficult to write about
• Write in a style or genre that’s completely different for you

If you only write about safe topics in a format that’s easy for you, then you’ll never realize what you’re fully capable of creating. If you always write rhyming poetry about flowers, try writing an experimental fiction piece about a space monster. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think it will every be published. Shake things up and do something crazy. In other words, live a little as a writer.

Say no to your editor

Writing is subjective. Editors are people, just like you are. They don’t have all the answers. Sometimes it’s okay to reject their edits. If your editor wants you to make a change that you sincerely feel will lessen the quality of your work, then don’t do it. At the end of the day, your writing is your art. Don’t let anyone else dictate what the end product is going to be.

This isn’t to say you should reject everything your editor tells you. After all, you trusted them to be your editor for a reason. In fact, you should probably accept most of their feedback and suggestions. If you are going to fight your editor on something, make sure it’s something worth fighting for!

Submit your work to the most prestigious publication

It’s actually pretty easy for writers to get their work accepted for publication. There are thousands of places online that will publish your work. Some of them have pretty low standards. If you can’t get an acceptance, you aren’t trying hard enough.

That doesn’t mean every acceptance is a grand accomplishment. At some point in your writing career, you have to decide what your writing is really worth. Are you okay giving away your fiction for free to small, non-paying venues with low standards? Or do you want to sell your short stories for what they are worth? Don’t be afraid of rejection. Send your best work to the best publications in the world and see what happens. The worst they can do is tell you no, and that might be better than getting your story accepted by Nobody Reads This Magazine Monthly. Spoiler alert: that magazine will be offline in a few months anyway, and your “accomplishment” will be short lived. So take a chance on yourself and send your work to those places with impossibly low acceptance rates.

Kill your darlings

One of the biggest risks you can take as a writer is to delete something you think is great. It’s important for every writer to be able to recognize and kill your darlings. It’s certainly not an easy thing to do, and it’s something that will cause you great doubt at first. But once you’ve done it, you’ll realize the risk of striking your favorite words from your manuscript was worth it.

Force yourself to finish a bad piece of writing

We all have bad pieces of writing. Those false starts, those unfinished stories, those terrible things we would never share with another human being. I encourage you not to hide all these things deep in the recesses of a dusty hard drive or the cloud. Instead, pull them out and take them across the finish line. You are a writer. You can turn even the most terrible thing into something worth reading, so take a risk on something that seems like it sucks.

Ignore the advice of writing experts

This might seem a bit contradictory showing up in a list for writers, but I encourage you to ignore the advice of good writers. No, I’m not saying you should never pay attention to what other writers tell you to do, but I am saying you should go against the grain and do what is best for you as a writer. Even the best writers aren’t always right. Remember how Stephen King told you never to use adverbs? He uses them all the time, and so do many other great writers. As a writer, you need to be able to ignore the bad writing advice, but you also need to be able to make your own rules.

Bonus risk: Write something that’s deeply personal

Yes, this was a bullet point from the very first risk on this list, but it warrants being its own point as well. We all have interesting lives. We are all unique on some level, even if it’s just the way we think. Everyone has some inner secret that could make a great story. Stop hiding it. Get that deepest, darkest secret out on paper and share it with the world. This doesn’t have to be a confession. You don’t have to treat it as an autobiography. But you do need to write about it.

If you take some or all of these risks as a writer, you will be able to accomplish something you otherwise wouldn’t have thought possible. So go ahead and start taking risks as a writer today.

What risks do you take as a writer? Share your biggest risks in the comments. And don’t forget to share this post on all your favorite channels.