Wading Into the Niche Debate
My view on this is colored by my experience
Stop putting yourself in a tight little box with your writing. The tighter the box, the more limited your success as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve seen a lot of pieces on pro- and anti-niche writing around here lately. Tim Denning says it’s not necessary. Dave McClure says it is. They have nearly 400K followers between them. I have less than 400, so who am I to wade into this debate?
I’m a professional journalist who has had far more success off Medium than on it, that’s who. And my opinion on this topic is colored solely by my experience in terrestrial print journalism. To wit:
I wrote more than 100 true stories of incredible people in 2009. I was in Iraq for the second time in my life, only this time as a journalist. A baby one, at that. I was fresh out of journalism school, where I received high marks for general writing ability.
The consistent knock against me was that I was topically focused too narrowly and not descriptive enough in my storytelling. I stuck with topics I was comfortable writing about due to personal interest.
I played it safe, completely ignoring what others wanted to hear — perhaps needed to hear.
My editor, who had been writing and doing journalism far longer than I likely ever will, came up with a plan to get my training wheels off. To get me out of my comfort zone and really engage with the art of telling stories.
“There are around 150 people in this building,” he said. “Your new assignment is to go around and interview as many of them as you can. Find out what makes them interesting. I want no less than five pieces a week from now until we go home.”
I got started. The first few interviews were difficult to navigate. I didn’t know the right questions to ask, and some of my subjects were just barely willing anyway. I didn’t turn in five stories the first week, which earned me a sharp tongue-lashing.
“You owe me seven next week,” my boss said with no trace of mercy in his tone. “Do not let yourself down again.”
Gradually, I began to gain momentum. I turned in seven stories the next week, and most of them came back unpublished and soaked in red ink. Each one had a single note at the top: “Correct and resubmit within 24 hours.” They were bad.
Each week, I received fewer returns and the red ink became less and less ubiquitous. The sixth week, I found nothing in my return box. That Friday, one of my stories made the cover. Above the fold, too.
I interviewed many people that year, ranging from visiting U.S. politicians to one guy who was a break-dancer on MTV in the 1980s. I met Iraqi dignitaries and kids from that country that were cleaning our building to earn the money necessary to feed their entire, large families.
By exposing myself to scores of different people and their wildly different stories, I became a much better writer. Telling the story of a special needs educator who played the flute in her National Guard unit’s Army band required a whole different set of skills from telling the story of three Christian refugees from Pakistan.
Just hearing all those stories also made me a better person. I learned the importance of listening with love and empathy to the story of my first roommate in Iraq, who happened to be a Muslim imam when he wasn’t serving in the U.S. Army Reserve. I also learned that there is a small contingent of Christians who are native to Iraq.
The Catholic Archbishop of the al-Basrah Province, who also owned all the schools and pharmacies in that area, enlightened me on that subject.
My editor stretched me in directions I didn’t even know existed. The end result of getting out of my niche? At least a third of my submissions wound up being picked up by U.S. media outlets all over the country. Three years after this deployment, I learned that many of my stories were converted into a script for a documentary.
Which led to this:
So yeah. I’m firmly in the No-Niche camp. Won’t you join me?
