Writing Your Way
You can’t write like them. You can only write like yourself.
Sometimes I wish every bit of writing advice — every talk, every blog post, every one-on-one conversation — began with a disclaimer:
This worked for me. It might or might not work for you. Give it a try. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it. Move on.
When we begin writing, there’s so much we’re trying to learn that it’s only natural to look for rules. And well-crafted stories do have some things in common, beginning with the fact that they all engage at least some readers, some of the time.
But beyond the basics of bringing words and characters and plots together, it all gets more complicated. Each writer not only tells different stories but also tells them in different ways.
Some writers outline; others jump in knowing nothing; others do something between or sideways of both these things. Some writers write multiple fast rough drafts; some write one slow, steady, careful one. Snappy dialogue or lush, descriptive prose. Advance research or learning what you need as you go. Writing every day or writing in passionate bursts of activity. Elaborate writing playlists or complete silence. A book every three months, a book a year, a book every five years.
No matter how you write, there’s someone out there who writes completely differently from you. And for many of us, there’s a voice inside our heads that, seeing that, begins to worry: Am I the one doing it wrong?
This voice is loudest on the days the writing is going badly, of course. If your messy draft took you five years to revise and you just found yet another rejection in your inbox–and if that’s the day you come across a blog post by a bestselling writer explaining that if only writers outlined, they’d waste less time — it’s hard not to wonder if they don’t have a point.
Ditto if your critique group just told you that your carefully outlined novel lacks voice, and then an award-winning author gives a talk about how the only way to find the heart of a book is to stop planning, plunge in, and listen to the story.
Neither of these bits of writing advice is wrong; they’re just not universal.
They left out the disclaimer: This worked for me. It might or might not work for you. Give it a try. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it. Move on.
It works the other way, too. After struggling to make sense of this whole writing thing, when we find something that really does work for us, it can seem like a revelation. We want to go out and share our shiny bit of new knowledge, maybe spare others the grief we went through to gain it. We want to shout, “Look! I figured out this thing that makes stories better! Everyone should use it!”
Sometimes, in that moment of revelation, it feels like everyone should.
I’ve been on both sides of this: doubting my instincts and experience when I heard that to become a true professional I needed to outline more; wondering aloud whether stories that relied too much on outlines would ever go as deep or be as powerful as they could be.
On one level, I knew every writer was different. On another, it took me years to truly understand and believe it.
What I believe now is that as writers we’re all on a journey to find our own best processes, the things that will let us tell our own stories as well as possible. It doesn’t matter what worked for someone else — not even if that someone else is a bestseller, or an award-winner, or a writer whose work you admire so much you desperately want to write just like them.
You can’t write like them. You can only write like yourself. If anything gets in the way of that — don’t worry about it. Move on.
So long as you’re trying to make your stories better, you’re not doing anything wrong.
Writing Your Way first appeared as a guest post on Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Cynsations. An expanded version appears in my ebook, Doing What You Love.
