Trying a Form You've Never Tried

At some point in most creative lives, you settle into your form. The essay, the novel, the short story, the painting, the song, the photograph. The form that suits you, that you've developed skill in, that feels like home. You know how it works. You know its possibilities and its constraints. You know how to move inside it.

This is a good thing. Mastery of a form is worth having and worth developing. The creative person who commits to a form long enough to develop genuine fluency in it can do things with it that the dabbler can't. There's real value in the depth that comes from long commitment to a single way of making.

And there's something that depth can close off, which is what this piece is about.

When you've been working in a form long enough, the form starts to anticipate you. You anticipate it. The moves available to you are the moves you've already made or watched others make. The possibilities you can imagine are the possibilities the form has already revealed to you. You're fluent, which means you're also, to some degree, contained.

Trying a form you've never tried breaks the containment. Not permanently, not as a replacement for the primary form, but as a specific kind of interruption that does something to the creative system that staying in the home form can't do.

What Incompetence Offers

The experience of being genuinely bad at something, of not knowing how the form works and not having the skills to execute it even when you understand what you're trying to do, is one that most creative people avoid after a certain point in their development.

This avoidance is understandable. Incompetence is uncomfortable. It produces work you can't stand behind. It's slow and frustrating and produces a lot of material that goes nowhere. If your creative identity is organized around being good at what you do, incompetence in a new form can feel threatening in ways that go beyond the ordinary difficulty of making things.

But incompetence in a new form also offers something that competence in the home form can't.

The beginner in a form is making decisions that the experienced practitioner has stopped making because experience has made them automatic. Where to put the line break. How to handle time in a visual composition. What the relationship between sound and silence can do in a piece of music. These are decisions that masters of the form make intuitively, having internalized the available options through long practice. The beginner has to make them consciously, which means the beginner is sometimes more awake to the possibilities than the expert.

The beginner also makes mistakes that the expert has learned not to make, and some of those mistakes are actually interesting. The accidental line break that creates a meaning the poem didn't intend. The compositional choice that violates the conventions of the form and turns out to be more alive than the conventional choice would have been. The musical decision that a trained musician would never make and that turns out to be exactly right.

Incompetence is generative in a way that mastery sometimes isn't. Not always. Not reliably. But often enough that the creative person who is willing to be genuinely bad at something they've never tried tends to get something from the experience that staying in the home form doesn't provide.

What Happens to the Primary Work

The most reliable effect of trying a form you've never tried is not what you make in the new form. It's what happens to the work you make in your primary form when you return to it.

Something loosens. The constraints of the home form that had become invisible because they were so familiar suddenly become visible again, because you've spent time in a different set of constraints and the contrast makes the home form's constraints perceptible in a new way.

The essay writer who tries poetry for a month returns to the essay with a different relationship to compression, to the weight of individual words, to what can be suggested rather than stated. The novelist who tries the short story returns to the novel with a different relationship to what's essential, to what can be cut, to how much the form can carry without explanation. The painter who tries sculpture returns to the canvas with a different relationship to space and dimension and the third axis that painting only implies.

This cross-form effect is real and it's one of the most compelling reasons to try forms outside your primary one. Not because you'll become a master of the new form, probably you won't, but because the new form will teach you something about your primary form that staying inside it couldn't.

Choosing the Form to Try

The most generative choice for the new form tends to be one that's different from your primary form in a specific and useful way, rather than just different at random.

If your primary form is primarily linguistic, writing in any of its varieties, trying a primarily visual or sonic form tends to produce the most significant cross-pollination. The encounter with a form that doesn't primarily use language forces you to think about what language does that other forms can't, and what other forms do that language can only approximate.

If your primary form is primarily visual, trying a primarily temporal form, music, performance, writing, introduces you to the specific challenges of time, of work that unfolds rather than being apprehended all at once, and that experience tends to come back into the visual work in interesting ways.

If your primary form is primarily solo, trying a collaborative form introduces you to the specific dynamics of making something with another person's creative will present in the work, which is a genuinely different experience from making something alone.

That said, the most important criterion is probably some genuine pull toward the new form. If you've always been vaguely curious about photography, or poetry, or ceramics, that curiosity is a better guide than any theoretical argument about which form would be most useful for your development. Following the genuine interest tends to produce more engagement with the new form than choosing it strategically.

How to Begin Without Expectations

The most common mistake when trying a new form is bringing the expectations of the home form to it. The novelist who tries poetry and applies novel-level ambition and standards to the poems. The painter who tries writing and expects the writing to achieve in a month what the painting took years to achieve. The musician who tries visual art and is disappointed that the visual work doesn't have the sophistication of the music.

These expectations kill the experiment before it has a chance to produce anything. The new form needs to be approached with beginner's standards, which is to say almost no standards at all, at least initially. The criterion for the early work in a new form is not that it's good. The criterion is that it's genuinely attempted, that you actually tried to work within the form rather than just making something adjacent to it.

Starting with exercises rather than projects helps with this. The formal exercise that's common in creative writing education, the imitation of a specific technique, the constraint that forces a specific kind of problem-solving, these are useful in any new form because they give the beginner something specific to work toward without requiring the sustained vision that a full project needs.

Reading or looking at or listening to a significant amount of work in the new form before you try it is useful, not to learn the rules so much as to develop some felt sense of what the form can do, what its possibilities and its pleasures are. You're trying to develop enough of a relationship with the form to work in it rather than just making something that happens to use its materials.

And making a significant quantity of work in the new form before you judge any of it is essential. The first ten poems are probably going to be bad. The first ten drawings are probably going to be frustrating. The first ten attempts at any new form are when you're just figuring out how the thing works, and judging them as though they were finished work tends to shut down the experiment before the actual learning begins.

The Resistance That Arrives

There's a specific resistance that tends to arrive when you're trying a new form, and it's worth naming because it can easily be misread as evidence that the experiment is a mistake.

The resistance says this isn't your form. That you're wasting time on something you're not going to be good at when you could be working on the things you are good at. That the work you're producing in the new form is bad and the badness is embarrassing and you should stop before you embarrass yourself further.

This resistance is the creative identity protecting itself from incompetence, which, as we've discussed, incompetence in a new form actually has something to offer. The resistance is not wrong that the work is bad. It's wrong about what the badness means and wrong about what to do with it.

The badness is appropriate. You're a beginner. Beginners make bad work. The bad work is the necessary passage through which the learning happens. Stopping at the bad work stage, before the learning has had time to produce anything, means leaving the experiment before it's had a chance to do what it can do.

The resistance to new form work also tends to contain an element of identity threat that's worth examining directly. If you've spent years or decades being someone who is good at a particular form, being someone who is bad at a form, even a different one, feels threatening in ways that are out of proportion to the actual stakes. You're not losing your competence in the home form. You're just discovering that you're a beginner in a new one, which is what you expected to be.

What to Do With What You Make

The work made in a new form during the early period of attempting it is generally not for sharing, at least not widely and not in the contexts where you're known for your primary form. This doesn't mean it has no value. It has the value of what it produced in you, the learning, the loosening, the cross-pollination effect on the primary form. It just may not have the quality to share usefully yet.

Some creative people keep their new-form experiments entirely private and that's a completely reasonable choice. Some share them in contexts specifically designed for beginners, where the low quality is expected and the sharing is about community and learning rather than about the work being finished. Some find that the distance the new form provides makes the work actually easier to share than work in their primary form, because the stakes feel lower and the identity investment is smaller.

The disposition toward the new-form work that tends to produce the most useful results is one of gentle curiosity rather than evaluation. What's interesting here? What did I learn from this attempt? What does this form do that my primary form doesn't? Not is this good, which in the early stages it probably isn't.

The Long Return

Every creative person who has seriously tried a form outside their primary one and then returned to the primary form has a version of the same story. Something changed. Something loosened or sharpened or became newly visible. The home form felt different after the time away in a different creative territory.

This return effect is the primary gift of the new-form experiment, and it's available even if the new-form work itself is entirely unsuccessful, even if you produce nothing in the new form that you'd want anyone to see.

The loosening it produces in the home form is real. The new visibility of the home form's constraints and possibilities is real. The cross-pollination of techniques and approaches and ways of solving creative problems is real.

Go be bad at something new.