"Why can't I write like THAT?"

Let's talk about envy when it comes to prose that isn't your own.

I have an author-friend who brings out the green monster in me.

I’ve watched this author write in real time. On several occasions in the past, we’d share a Google Doc and work on our drafts, leaving comments and cheering each other on. I would quite literally watch her typing in the doc, spilling out beautiful line after beautiful line at a rate of speed that can only be described as Author Autobahn.

I can type fast. But phrases like that don’t just flow, not for me. My process starts with me spilling sand all over the place. It’s an absolute mess. Revising is when I start to shape the sandcastles.

I should add that my author-friend does not see her own writing as effortlessly gorgeous. She’s perfectly aware that she writes fast, but she sees plenty of flaws in her first drafts. We are all our own worst critics.

“All first drafts have to do is exist” is a mantra oft repeated by authors, myself included. It’s not actually because those first drafts are garbage. It’s because the story, the scenes, it’s all polished and perfect in our minds, but it’s not coming out that way, and we’re frustrated. 

Imagine a beautiful sculpture. Really visualize all of the intricate details. Now imagine yourself standing in front of a hunk of marble or clay. You can see the sculpture you want. But are you going to make it happen by attacking it with a hammer and a chisel? No! You’re just going to get the vague shape of it. Then you pull out another set of tools and get to work on the details.

It takes multiple passes. It’s just absurd, unrealistic, and frankly unfair to yourself to expect this story and your prose to come out exactly as you imagine the first time. An artist can see the sculpture in his mind from the beginning. But he doesn’t give it one pass with his chisel and then give up. 

“When I’m writing the first draft, the prose is awful.” GOOD! That means you’re doing it right! If you have a clear vision of this big, beautiful, emotional story in your mind but you think it’s coming out awkward, then guess what? You’re doing it right! This is a process. And the fact that you can see it, you can envision the final result you want, is great because that means you’ll know what to aim for when you start revising. 

Also, and I know you know this but I’m saying it anyway, please oh please do not compare your first drafts to the published novels on your bookshelf. And if you catch yourself doing that, then pull out one of those novels and read the acknowledgements. Read that list of critique partners, agents, editors, copyeditors who all had their eyes on this story, who all helped the author shape it and shape it and work with those finer chisels until it became the masterpiece you’re holding in your hands. And then laugh at yourself for how ridiculous you were being, comparing your masterpiece-in-progress to one already in a museum. 

Don’t conflate polished with perfect. In fact, stop aiming for perfection all together. If you’re a perfectionist, I have a hard truth for you: You are standing in your own way. Your pursuit of perfect isn’t just impossible, it’s actively harmful to your career as an author and to your books. Perfectionism is a fear of failure, and fear makes you pull back, and pulling back means you’re never going to get that big beautiful story out of your mind and onto the page.

This isn’t about perfection. It’s about standing out. What makes your book stand out? What makes you, as an author, what makes your voice and your prose stand out? Readers don’t want another Nora Roberts or Paulo Coelho or Ta-Nehisi Coates—why would they want an imitation, when they could just read Nora Roberts or Paulo Coelho or Ta-Nehisi Coates? 

So forget about how great their writing is. What about YOUR prose is unique? What about YOUR voice is unique? That’s what you should be focusing on, not perfection. When you really internalize this, you realize how pointless it is to play the comparison game—and ultimately, that’s what’s going to help you let go of envy, at least as much as possible. 

Now, if you don’t know what makes your prose stand out yet, that’s okay—I don’t think most authors do when they’re just starting out, and it can take awhile to figure it out. The best thing you can do, obviously, is write. It’s like working out a muscle, making it stronger. 

There’s one more thing I want to talk about related to prose and voice because it was something I spent most of my career feeling insecure about. Some authors have a very clear, distinct voice that carries through every book they write. The kind of author where, if you saw a random page you’d never read, you would know immediately that they wrote it. And that’s awesome. 

But a lot of us don’t have that. Our prose, our voices, kind of change from project to project. I think this is especially true of authors who write in more than one genre. 

My first series I Heart Band! was this bubbly contemporary middle grade full of friendship and drama. It has, I think, a strong voice. It is nothing like my two middle grade standalone novels, which are dark fairy tales. They, too, have strong voices, I think. They’re in my voice. But so’s the bubbly contemp. Hmm. 

If I really looked, I could find similarities here. I could spot my author fingerprint. There’s more to prose than the way you turn a phrase. It’s how you set up a joke and deliver a punchline. It’s how you build suspense. It’s how you reveal a twist.

As another example, let’s look at two books I co-authored with different authors. In The Pros of Cons, Alison, Lindsay, and I received a lot of praise for the way our voices complimented one another, how they went together yet our characters were all distinct. I adapted a little bit to make this work, and I’m sure they did too. My character Phoebe had a really acerbic attitude. In one round of edits, to make her voice even more distinct from the other two protagonists, I sharpened up her prose, made it more blunt, more sparse. If I’d written her story as its own book, alone, I don’t think I would’ve gone that far. But this is still my voice, right? It’s still my prose. 

The other example is the Secrets of Topsea series. My co-author Kirsten and I are very different writers with very different styles, but this collaboration worked because the concept specifically came from our love of creepy, quirky middle grade books from our childhood, specifically Sideways Stories from Wayside School. Now if you want to talk about writers who write magical prose in a first draft, that’s Kirsten. As we worked on these books together, I paid closer attention to my turns of phrase, found a little bit more lyricism to my own prose than I would have had I written these books alone. 

It’s okay to sound different from one book to the next. I wish someone had said that to me years ago. We get so caught up in branding and keeping your readers hooked by delivering to them what they expect from you, and I think all of that can really stunt our growth, hinder our evolution as authors.

The point is, another author might come up with a similar concept to yours, or a similar character, title, world, whatever—but they will never sound like you. Period. So relax. Your only competition is you, and to win, all you have to do is figure out what the strengths of your prose and your voice are.

How? Obviously, write. Write a lot. It’s a muscle and you’ve got to work it out to make it stronger. Take those novels you love with that prose you envy and find a passage that, in your opinion, is the weakest part of the book. Now rewrite it and make it sound like you. Take the parts of your own book that you think exhibits your best prose and study it. Identify what, exactly, makes your prose so strong there. Then do more of that. Write more of that. Write more. 

Feeling brave? Okay, good—in the comments, tell me what your favorite thing about your writing is. What is your greatest strength? The book you’re writing right now, what makes it AMAZING? I want to see some bragging.

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The posts I publish here will remain free. But I have a new series called Ask the Editor, which will publish every Friday. The short pitch: Dear Abby for writers.

The longer pitch: paid subscribers ($5/month or $50/year, cancel anytime) will receive a link to a form where they can submit pretty much anything within a two page limit. Things like…

• Queries

• Synopses

• Pages from their novel

• Questions about writing or traditional publishing

• A current problem or situation in their writing journey (ie: trying to decide if an agent is a schmagent, disagreeing with beta feedback, etc)

• A rant about this whole “trying to get published” endeavor to a sympathetic ear

Every Friday, I’ll respond to/critique as many submissions as I can and publish them together in one post. Because they’ll be behind a paywall, there’s some privacy—your query, pages, or rant about that one really horrible rejection won’t be online for editors to discover when they Google you.

That’s it! I hope to see you over there. :)

Michelle