Does Leaving Your Comfort Zone Make You A Better Storyteller?
The Idea of the Comfort Zone and Its Influence on Storytelling
Welcome to this week’s Sunday Evening edition of The Backlot. These newsletters will include stories from my recent experiences working in documentary filmmaking, helpful resources for emerging filmmakers, and other posts covering topics in the documentary industry.
NOTE - The Sunday evening version of the newsletter is free. Future mid-week posts on Wednesday evenings will require a paid subscription.
This week, we’re exploring the idea of the comfort zone and its impact on storytelling…
🎞️ The Comfort Zone in Storytelling
🎬 The Subtle Fruits of Our Labor
🗞️ Wrapping Up & Recommendations of the Week
The Comfort Zone & Storytelling
“To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.”
This is a quote from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which they use as the fictional version of Life Magazine’s motto. Interestingly, the film’s version of the motto is paraphrased from the original Life Magazine mission statement, which was written by Henry Luce in 1936.
As some of you know from previous editions of this newsletter, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is one of my favorite films of all time. So much so that a friend once gifted me a hand-stitched wallet with this motto written on the leather inside, and it remains one of my most prized possessions.
Now, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a fantastic movie, but there is more to my love for the Ben Stiller film than just a good storyline and some fantastic cinematography. This film represents something I believe to my core - the true beauty of this life lies outside of your comfort zone.
I’m a strong believer in testing the comfort zone, and seeking experiences that push you to step outside this cozy little bubble that we’ve established for ourselves.
This mindset has pushed me to do some incredible things, including moving to a country where I barely spoke the language, pursuing a career in a field that I had no formal background in (twice), and testing the limits of both my mental and physical abilities.
In fact, I’ve made a habit of trying to exist outside my comfort zone because, in life, it's the place where I have found the truest and most exciting versions of myself.
Now, I’m also not saying that a comfort zone is necessarily a bad thing. As I write this newsletter, I am sitting in my home office, drinking a cup of coffee, and living well within the confines of my comforts.
The problem is this safe space can become addictive and stymie our ability to think differently about the world. And as writers, filmmakers, and general storytellers, this can be detrimental to our creativity and craft.
Creativity and the Comfort Zone
Let’s start by defining the comfort zone. The comfort zone is a place of familiarity; it's the normal routine where our ideas, perspectives, and concepts of the world feel safe, protected, and understood. In most of our lives, if we are fortunate enough, we will exist within the confines of this zone.
Now, each person's comfort zone is different, and one individual’s idea of comfort may be uncomfortable for another. Therefore, the idea of venturing outside of this zone is subjective, and this process is completely internal.
For example, over the years, I’ve noticed this very interesting phenomenon in my life: my best ideas for articles, books, and screenplays have come to me while I am traveling to foreign places or pushing my physical limitations in nature.
In these experiences, I’ve always been in an unfamiliar place or away from the confines of my normal routine - aka my comfort zone.
These new and uncomfortable places challenged me to rethink my ideas of myself, my limitations, and the world.
This is different from when I am inside my comfort zone and I am not being challenged. In this safe space, my ideas of life are fixed, and nothing is pushing me to think about my already-established notions of this existence.
For each of us, our comfort zone is a place where our perspectives of the world, our lives, and our thoughts are simply allowed to exist without being pushed forward or challenged to grow.
This means the stories we can tell are limited because they only pertain to who we are, not who we are, in comparison to the vast world around us.
Truthfully, many things exist outside of our comfort zone, whether they are experiences, cultures, or thoughts; there are universes that live outside of the bubbles we’ve built around ourselves.
In fact, speaking of bubbles, I want to share a thought with you that summarizes how stepping outside our comfort zone makes us better storytellers.
In a recent conversation with my partner, who is a philosopher and artist, she was sharing one of her favorite ideas from the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer.
One of his ideas postulates the concept of horizons and the fusion of horizons. In his work, Gadamer refers to a horizon as “the totality of all that can be realized or thought about by a person at a given time in history and in a particular culture.”
In other words, a horizon is the limit of our imagination and understanding of the world because of our fixed position in it. In many ways, this horizon is also the edge of the comfort zone because outside of it, there lie worlds that we do not know how to navigate or exist in—places of discomfort.
This idea refers beyond physical horizons, too; these are intellectual horizons of thoughts, and our fixed position is more of the fixed ideas in our mind than a position on this earth, although it is influenced by location.
When we extend this idea to storytelling, we can see how our ability to tell stories is limited by these horizons. Because we cannot tell stories of the lands or existence beyond the horizon because we do not know anything about those places.
In other words, we can only write stories about the concepts, ideas, and perspectives we know and understand. It’s only when we fuse our horizons with other horizons that we can begin to extend them and learn more about the world.
Okay, maybe we are getting a bit too philosophical. Let’s bring it back to storytelling.
In our work, our ability to tell a story is limited to our perceptions, ideas, and thoughts about the world. We feel safe and comfortable in these ideas, and therefore, they are more likely to be expressed in our story.
In reality, the better story may be one that considers a variety of ideas, perspectives, and experiences in the world—the overall human experience.
To reach those depths, we are going to have to get uncomfortable. We are going to have to challenge our own beliefs about the ideas within the story and try to learn and experience things that are unfamiliar to us.
In addition to this exposure to new ideas and perspectives, stepping outside of our comfort zone will cause us to experience change within ourselves.
Just as I’ve felt when running across foreign landscapes or trying to speak a new language in a foreign city, my exposure to this discomfort caused me to change the ideas held within my comfort zone.
Therefore, when we dare to venture beyond the confines of our safe and constructed bubble, we can begin to grow and postulate our own new understanding of the world. With this new information, we can also begin to redefine certain things within this comfort zone, therefore changing our perspectives of life altogether.
This growth sparks new ideas for stories, new concepts to explore, and new interests that can spark our imagination.
For these reasons, I would invite any storyteller to venture beyond their comfort zone. Introduce yourself to new concepts, travel to new places, and meet new people. Out there, beyond our horizons, lies a greater ability to tell stories and help make sense of this crazy experience we call life.
The Subtle Fruits of Our Labor
Over the past year, I’ve been working with Central Oregon LandWatch and the Camp Five Films team to produce a series of short videos about the efforts to protect a local forest.
On Friday night, I was asked to speak on a panel about this production alongside several of the individuals who had been interviewed for the campaign. The event was a wonderful and intimate evening, where we got to reconnect and share a few of our thoughts about our involvement in the campaign.
As the evening concluded, though, I felt an overwhelming gratitude toward my line of work and the stories I’ve been allowed to tell over the past few years. It is truly remarkable to think of all these individuals who trusted me with their words, perspectives, and stories.
I do not take this responsibility lightly, and to see the fruits of our labor projected on this small screen in a room full of people who were a part of the project was nothing short of magical.
The night was especially important to me because of my background in conservation and environmental journalism. One of the major reasons I went into filmmaking was to tell stories about the people who are affected by conservation—the ones whose stories matter the most.
Working with these communities has given me so much understanding of environmental issues, and their stories have fundamentally altered my perspectives toward the world.
That’s why I’ve always seen my job as a documentary filmmaker and journalist as a vessel for the voices of others. My work is a megaphone for individuals and communities who are at the heart of each issue. My job is simply to create a place where they can make their voices heard.
After a year of working on this campaign, I felt like we had done our job. We had created a series to be proud of and something that may help these individuals incite lasting change in the local community. Something that we can all be proud of.
In the end, it was this feeling that made it all worth it—not the money or the views (although 13 million is quite a lot)—but the feeling of having contributed something meaningful to the issues that mean the most to me. I felt like I had really been a part of making change, and isn’t that all we are really trying to do?
Recommendations of the Week
This week, we’re changing up the recommendations section and offering a few bits of culture from the past week and beyond…
Robert Egger’s new Nosferatu trailer was released this week
David Remnick profiled Kevin Costner in The New Yorker
The Archaeology of Knowledge by philosopher Michael Foucault
Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider which captures the emotionally stirring story of a journalist capturing a serial killer in Iran
And, of course, go watch The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Quote of the Week
“In science, it often happens that scientists say, 'You know, that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds, and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should because scientists are human, and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
- Carl Sagan