Specialization is for Insects

I first encountered this quote when I was in highschool, and it resonated with me.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

It often felt like society encourages us to be one thing or sees us as only one thing―such as our job. But there was so many things that I wanted to do or be that the idea of being ONE thing just seemed wrong.

I suppose that’s why I wanted to become a writer, because when I’m writing I am, for a time, able to do so much more, be so many more things.

Yet even in this field, we are encouraged to be ONE thing. Ask anyone about becoming successful as a writer, and one of the first things you’ll hear is to pick a niche and stick with it. You don’t want to confuse the audience by being more than one kind of writer.

Writers often take on pen names for that very reason, so they can write in other genres without having the baggage of their earlier work attached to it. Actors and directors also run the risk of being pigeon holed.

The closest I’ve come to a pen name is by adding my middle initials to my work. Noah Chinn is my genre fiction, like SF or urban fantasy, while Noah J.D. Chinn is my more grounded and contemporary stuff, like mysteries, romcoms, or other stuff.

And now in the past couple of years I’ve branched into cartooning.

In case you’re wondering why I do cartooning, well, drawing is relaxing as well as challenging. And the strips are like micro-doses of creativity, little stories that I eventually hope to build into one big story.

It gives me a chance to engage with my readers on a regular basis, since waiting six months or more for another book can be a bit much. I even managed to cross-fertilize a little bit. The roleplaying game the characters play is the same setting as my SF books, and over the course of their adventures I managed to think through some world building for the SF setting, and even figured out an interesting solution for a problem in my third book.

But at the end of the day we’re all more than one thing, we just sometimes forget it. If you ever feel like life has pigeon holed you, just remember all the other things you are capable of doing. It might not be the same list that Heinlein gives above, but I’ll bet it’s almost as impressive!