When I was linking to The Gargoyle for the last post, I found a bit on the Amazon page where the writer, Andrew Davidson, talks about his process of becoming a writer. 

Any writing teacher will tell you you’re supposed to read everything you can get your hands on.  But he says doing that just made him write like the writer he was reading at the time,  “word raping” he calls it.  He worked hard to find his own unique voice.   Here’s an excerpt but read the whole thing if you have time:

While in Japan, I entertained myself by writing and, having already mangled poetry, short stories, stage plays and screenplays, I thought it was time to give a novel a shot. A strange thing happened: I found that I don’t write like other people when it comes to novels—or at least, none of which I know. It’s true that I’ve read comparisons of my novel to a number of other books—The Name of the Rose, The English Patient, The Shadow of the Wind—but I haven’t read any of them.

I read something else about Davidson – he’s from Winnipeg, a small Canadian city not known for being a literary hotbed.  And he was sending the manuscript around to publishers and got detailed feedback from one editor who assumed that he’d ignore the feedback and just go on to the next publisher, because that’s what most writers do. 

And instead Davidson did a full edit of the 500+ page manuscript, incorporating the editor’s suggestions, had it bound and sent it in again.  Can you imagine having the faith to do all that work when you have no idea if it’s going to pan out?

But it did for him, he got the million+ dollar multiple language/country book deal.  Which is really impressive for a first novel.  Or any novel, really.

Yesterday I found Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED video where she talks about the pressure of writing something to follow her last incredible success, Eat Pray Love.  She said everyone loves to tell her it probably won’t measure up and how terrifying that must be.  But it sounds like she shows up to do the work anyways.   The video is 20 minutes, but totally worth it.

She suggests that maybe our genius is outside of us so it’s not all about us toiling alone in frustration trying to produce something interesting and then hitting the bottle when it fails miserably.  She says that maybe we can only work with the genius we’re handed.   Maybe our genius has good days and bad too.  Maybe our muse needs to step up and take some responsibility as well.   I like that.  My muse can start by taking responsibility for the grammatical errors in this blog, I’m busy finding my unique voice ;-)

The bottom line seems to be   – find your voice even if it means not following the rules.  Find a medium, even if it means mangling them all.  Do the work.  And be kind to your genius and share responsibility for the results.