Hey everyone! Here I am with the first standalone post for this month. For those of you who missed my last post and the announcement that went with it here it is. These last three Saturdays of May I will be publishing stand alone posts. These are posts that I want to do that don’t necessarily fit in with any of the posts that I’ve written in the past and don’t fit in with any series that I have planned for the future. So, these three posts will be about single topics that I want to share. I hope that they can be just as interesting and entertaining as my normal posts. So, without further ado…
The Best Writing Advice I’ve Ever Received
I have received a lot of writing advice over the years. Much of it has been through reading books about writing written by other writers/authors. Some of it came from my observations on writing by reading several different books in several different genres. Some of it came from other aspiring authors. Some of it has come from writing conferences where published authors taught workshops on different topics of writing. But the best advice I ever received about writing did not come from any of these resources. It came from a writing group I participated in during National Novel Writing Month.
During that particular month I was working on my first new project in several years and I was also helping some younger writers for their first National Novel Writing Month. I had joined writing groups in the past for National Novel Writing Month, but I’d never actively participated in them before. I usually would join the group, keep up to date with others progress and that would motivate me to continue writing to I could get to where they were getting to. But I knew for that year that just participating only lightly in the group would not give me the proper motivation to continue on. I knew that I needed to be more active in the group. So, I logged on for several online meetings during the week that didn’t conflict with my schedule and also tuned in for a couple of meetings on the weekends. Most of the meetings was just writers chatting about their writing, giving each other advice, and occasionally doing writing sprints where we would set a timer and you had to write as much as you could in that time limit and then we stopped to see how much each person had written.
It was during one of these writing meetings on a weekend, right after a writing sprint, that one of the members of the group said something that blew me away. She said, “Make your writing yours.” This was some of the best writing advice I’ve ever received. I was determined to follow it. Although this advice sounded easy to follow at first, I found out that it was much harder to achieve then I had originally planned.
My first problem was that I didn’t really understand what it meant to make my writing mine. So, first I did some work trying to decide what made my writing my own. The longer I looked at it the more I saw what made my writing like everyone else’s and I first began to grow discouraged. I dropped many projects I had been excited about and slowly began writing less and less. If my story ended there however, this wouldn’t be the best writing advice I’ve ever received.
At one point I was having a conversation with a friend about my writing and by then I hadn’t been writing for several months. I was lamenting that I couldn’t find anything to write and didn’t have the motivation because nothing I wrote was unique. I told her the whole story about that piece of advice and how it had influenced my writing life so far. She stared at me for a little bit like I was an idiot and I felt like an idiot after the statement she then made. She said, “She didn’t mean that your writing had to be new. She just meant that your writing had to be uniquely you. If the story is similar to another then make the writing style unique. If your writing style and story are similar to a different book, then add a weird quirk like an unreliable narrator or an extreme plot twist no one would expect. She didn’t mean that your writing had to be universally unique she just meant your writing had to be you.”
Now you can see why I felt like an idiot after she made that statement. That is one of the most basic parts of writing. Something that for some reason, as a writer who had been writing for years and practicing for even longer, has failed to remember. Making your writing your own is one of the most basic rules of writing. If every book was unique, we wouldn’t have fan fiction or genre types. Every mystery novel is the same and yet it is also not the same because the writer made the story theirs. Every romance novel is the same and yet every romance novel is somehow not the same. Every biography or autobiography is the same and yet is not the same because each person is their own person with a different story, a different life, and different experiences. Every book is not the same because very author is different.
So, make the writing yours.
This was the singular best piece of advice I have ever received because sometimes, no matter how good you get, you just need to go back to the basics and remember what is really important when writing a book. The story needs to be yours. If a writer or an author does not retain the most basic principles of writing, then no matter what kind of special skill or writing technique they add to the page, it will never be quite right. The basics are important.
I hope that you enjoyed this week’s post. I have two more weeks of stand-alone posts that aren’t part of a particular series. There might be more of these in the future after the next series or the one after that. I think they are a good way for me to address topics I want to write about that don’t really fit into different series titles. It also gives me a good chance to prepare for the next series. Next weeks stand alone post is a commentary on what I think the hardest things about being a writer are. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, or follow me on social media. Have a good day and remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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