Diversity vs. Specialization

I love playing Super Smash Bros. I played it a ton in college with my friends and got very good at it. I reached a point where I may not win at professional tournaments, but I could destroy any casual player. I played with many different people, all of whom had different preferences on how to play.

Some of my friends loved playing 4-player free-for-all. Others preferred playing 2-on-2 or 1-on-3 team matches. Some people loved using items and others never had them on. My friends and I all got a taste of just about every variation of combat situations and got pretty good at all of them.

The same thing would happen with characters. In Super Smash Bros. Melee, which I played the most, there are 26 characters to choose from. Though there are definitely characters I liked more than others, I learned how to fight with any of them. Some I did better with, so I stuck with my favorites, but even still, I had maybe 6 different characters I would switch between regularly.

A couple of my friends, though, would only play in tournament style. This meant playing one-on-one duels with no items on a flat terrain. Essentially, these fights would be a matter of pure skill. I had no problem playing the game this way, but it was insanely frustrating because those friends were insanely good at it. They studied on how to be the most effective with a character and they only used that one person.

After enough pleading, I would occasionally get my friends to play anything other than tournament style. At that point, I destroyed them.

This story has nothing to do with writing, but it does illustrate the difference between diversity and specialization. And that does have to do with writing. As a writer, you make a number of choices about what you write. There are forms (essay, poem, short story), genres (comedy, horror, sci-fi), and subjects (judicial system, vampires, high school). You could choose to write in any form, with any genre, about any subject, or you could do the opposite and only write one very specific kind of thing.

When I was in college (during that time that I wasn't playing video games), my writing professors would say that I should specialize. I should figure out what kind of writing I want to do and focus on doing it the best I can. I admit it is pretty good advice. Being good at a lot of different kinds of writing is nice, but it also means that I won't stand out in any one field. So by specializing, it gives me the best choice of being the best writer I can be. However, it can also turn me into a one-trick pony.

That is the unending conflict between diversification and specialization. The only answer to what to do is inside you. My recommendation is to do the kind of writing you want to do. If you are writing for yourself (as opposed to doing it for a job), then you should make yourself happy. If you feel like doing several stories in a similar vein, then go for it. If you want to try a bit of everything, then do that instead. If there is a middle ground and you have about 6 different things that you like to switch between, that's fine, too. Writing something you are interested in should yield better results than writing something you don't care about. Eventually, you will weed out the stuff you don't like and you will specialize to some degree just out of interest alone.