Sounding Like Somebody Else
I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember. Not to brag, but I was the only student in my elementary school to ever win the Best Writer Award more than twice. Maybe it’s the curriculum I followed through grade school, but there was always an emphasis of reading works of the greats—Hemingway, Steinbeck, Twain, Fitzgerald—and trying to be like them. I think a lot of writers may fall into this trap, but trying to sound like other authors is what can make writing so difficult. The problem with this is: we shouldn’t be trying to sound like somebody else.For the better part of a decade, I’ve been working on finishing and publishing a novel. I have a completed first draft of one, which is currently shelved, and a near-complete first draft of a second. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on the latter. The novel I’m working on has been restarted a number of times. I’ve changed the perspective, starting point, and tone multiple times. Unfortunately, I’ve found myself not doing this because I think it will make the story better, but because it will make me sound like someone else—a Pulitzer or Booker Prize winner. Once, I read an online forum where people swore up and down that only immature writers use first perspective to tell a story. That night, I started rewriting the draft, following the same tale, but from third person.
In the past month, I’ve heard two great pieces of writing advice: (1) just keep writing (2) stop trying to sound like somebody else. Both have greatly improved my outlook on my own writing.
Just keep writing
Don’t stop to go back and read from the beginning until it’s over. The first draft of a novel is you telling yourself the story. Don’t pause your progress to return and fix a subplot or dialogue. Instead, if you must, make a separate list of things to return to once you’ve completed the first draft. If you don’t like the dialogue between two characters, note it to fix later. If a scene should be added to make two story points flow better, note it to fix later.
When I first heard this piece of advice, I couldn’t help but think of the George R.R. Martin conversation had with Stephen King:
Martin: How the fuck do you write so many books so fast? I think, "Oh, I've had a really good six months, I've finished three chapters." And you've finished three books in that time.
King: Here's the thing, okay? There are books, and there are books. The way that I work, I try to get out there and I try to get six pages a day. So, with a book like End of Watch, and ... when I'm working I work every day--three, four hours, and I try to get those six pages, and I try to get them fairly clean. So if the manuscript is, let's say, 360 pages long, that's basically two months work. ... But that's assuming it goes well.
Martin: And you do hit six pages a day?
King: I usually do.
Martin: You don't ever have a day where you sit down there and it's like constipation? And you write a sentence and you hate the sentence, and you check your email and you wonder if you had any talent after all? And maybe you should have been a plumber? (Laughs) Don't you have days like that?
King: No. I mean, there's real life, I could be working away, and something comes up and you have to get up ... but mostly I try to get the six pages in.
Our own voice
We know our story better than anyone else, and we very might well know how to tell it better than anyone else, too. What I used to do was read the works of my favorite authors—Henri Bosco, Mark Z. Danielewski, Hanya Yanagihara—and try to mimic not their pacing or other valuable elements, but their tone. This was a bad idea for a number of reasons: it wasted my time trying to match their tone, combining their styles made for a not-so-great, hodge-podge of a reading experience, losing my own voice in the process.
I think this came down to a lack of confidence in my own writing. I wanted to sound like a great writer, so I tried to mimic great writers, when I should have just been looking for inspiration to better my own work.
When I stopped trying to replicate and relied on my own style, my own voice, I found myself writing so much faster. I was soaring through a first draft the way some others do. Not saying speed is a necessary factor in writing a first draft—Donna Tartt would greatly disagree with this notion, taking a decade between each novel—but I like that I’m not wasting time on replication, rather telling myself the story in the way I want to hear it.
Many say there are no such things as original thoughts anymore, everything is pulling inspiration from something else. Whether you believe it or not, there is an oversaturation of content being sent out into the public sphere, and it’s hard to have an idea you haven’t at least seen a few similarities within elsewhere. For a lot of writers, we want to create a work which goes beyond us. At least for me, I like the idea of having a work that is taught critically in classrooms. I don’t strive for financial gain as much as I do cultural longevity. Is this bold and pretentious? Probably at least a little. Maybe I’m just chasing that high of winning the Best Writer Award more than twice in grade school.