Avoid a Creative Slump By Writing and Publishing in a Different Medium

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Today’s post is by author, filmmaker, and podcaster Elizabeth Rynecki.

Through a quirk of fate, I avoided the dreaded “first-book comedown” that often follows the publication of a debut work. The feeling of having poured everything into a single personal project and then wondering, what’s next? never quite hit me. That’s because after the release of Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy (NAL/Penguin Random House), I pivoted to finishing my documentary film.

Also called Chasing Portraits, the film wasn’t a replica of the book. Instead, the film echoed the story I told in my book. That said, I should be clear: I didn’t actually dodge the slump, I just postponed it—I hit the proverbial wall when it came to finding project number three. But I carried forward an important lesson from projects one and two: Writing in an entirely different medium gives you the opportunity to explore storytelling in fresh and interesting ways.

Initially after the film screenings came to an end, I thought I’d write about my father’s ship salvage career. For more than 30 years my father traveled around the world helping rescue, repair, or recover maritime vessels in distress. But as I pondered my approach, working through his substantial archive of write-ups, reports, and photos of stranded or damaged ships, my younger son’s challenges with ADHD became increasingly debilitating. Strangely enough, as my focus bounced between the two subjects—and as improbable as this sounds—my father’s ship salvage stories slowly metamorphosed into metaphors for understanding my son’s ADHD.

As I debated writing about this unorthodox and unexpected combination, I tried explaining it to my writing group. They didn’t quite grasp the concept of the interwoven essays I envisioned, but encouraged me to follow my heart. Eventually, I had a manuscript. One that I loved and that I felt readers would find compelling. I told agents in my query letter that the book offered readers not a guidebook, but a lived experience of parenting a neurodivergent kid. Unfortunately, the literary agents I queried didn’t share my enthusiasm for the book.

But then something remarkable happened. A friend read the manuscript and he did find it compelling. More importantly, he asked, “What if we turned it into a podcast?”

At first I panicked. I knew shifting to a radically different format wouldn’t just be about moving paragraphs around, killing darlings, and rewriting dialogue. This would require my fully rethinking how to tell the story. But then I remembered a key lesson from my prior projects: different media help you tell your story in different ways.

I decided to go for it, because while I knew this would test me in ways that stretched far beyond a mere rewrite, telling my story in podcast format was a chance to immerse myself and the audience in a very different experience. And ideally, if we (my friend helped with the writing and took the lead on producing the podcast) did it well, we could not only transport listeners into the heart of my family’s stories, but we could add more perspectives of ADHD that could help give the audience a deeper and broader understanding of ADHD.

The process of coming up with the episode format, figuring how to weave together my story, the shipwreck stories, and ultimately the stories of our close to two dozen interviewees, was a process of trial and error. Sometimes what looked good on the page sounded terrible when we recorded it, and sometimes things that didn’t look quite right on the page, flowed well in audio.

Eventually we found our voice for the podcast, both metaphorically and literally, as we decided that I should narrate it. Which, even though I’d done the voice-over for my documentary film, led to my seeking out a voice lesson from a vocal narration coach to help me get closer to the delivery we wanted to nail. As my podcasting partner and I reimagined my original manuscript into a series of six podcast episodes (each focused on a different ADHD topic and different salvage effort), we quickly realized that, while podcasting is very much a modern form of oral storytelling, the medium demands a different structure and rhythm. Our podcast (That Sinking Feeling: Adventures in ADHD and Ship Salvage) required a different balance of pacing, tone, and sound design.

For me, the shift from book to podcast wasn’t about abandoning my book—it was about finding a different but equally compelling through-line. In writing, you can craft a cadence with punctuation to emphasize meaning. Transforming the book into a podcast allowed us to layer the narrative with more nuance. Instead of simply quoting my father’s words on the page, listeners would hear directly from him. And when a ship crashed and exploded into flames, we could do more than just describe it—we could share the actual audio from a U.S. Coast Guard film, making the disaster feel much more immediate.

This isn’t an argument that every author should turn their book into a limited series podcast. But I do believe that the experience of writing for different media is a worthy endeavor. I know a number of authors who have taken filmmaking classes in order to think about book scenes from a movie-going perspective. Other authors have written stage plays to better understand their characters. Writing for different media engages our imaginations in profoundly important ways. And learning to think more critically about how sound, tone, and narration work to carry a story is a worthwhile exercise for all writers.

This is all to say that authors need to be willing to consider beyond the act of writing words on a real or virtual page when trying to best tell a particular story. Ultimately, I think we as writers need to have a very broad view of what counts as reading. This really isn’t a radical idea in the current media environment: the idea of what counts as reading has evolved dramatically over the past 20 years, first with the rise of audiobooks and then with the ubiquity of podcasts and social media. While some people cling to the traditional definition of reading as engaging with printed words on a page, many of us now understand that reading extends far beyond the confines of physical paper. We listen to stories as much as we read them, and watch them too. The underlying lesson for me is that all media have the power to convey emotion, information, and imagination. The question is which is the best way to tell a particular story, and there may be more than one answer. As technology evolves, and our experience with different formats grows and shifts, so too does storytelling.

Podcast storytelling—as opposed to the interview format—offers the potential for a deeply engaging and personal way to engage with audiences. So if you’re an author looking to make a meaningful connection with your audience, it’s a format definitely worth exploring.

For me, pivoting to a different storytelling format has never been about choosing one medium over the other. It’s about embracing the unique strengths of each format. Whether you’re holding a book in your hands or listening to a podcast episode, you’re still engaging with a story, expanding your understanding, and growing. In the same way that it’s important for authors to read widely across genres, styles, and structures, I believe it’s equally essential for writers to consume stories, regardless of source or format. You never know how shifting from one medium to another might spark fresh insights or help you approach your writing in new, unexpected ways.