Sing your own song

It's a brand spanking new year!!

I LOVED reading Lindsay's post, The Year to Believe! I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Not just about believing in the process of writing, querying, and finally making it, but also believing in your own voice as a writer.

I've written about this before. It's something I struggle with that, despite my six manuscripts, continues to make me feel like a beginning writer. I obsess over 'getting my voice right' rather than going with my gut. A few members of my family have read my rougher drafts and then later drafts and been disappointed. "Why did you take this out? Why did you add in all these mucky details?" They liked the way it came out at first, raw and flowing. My little sister tells me repeatedly, "Write for yourself."

Write for yourself.

But I'm writing for publication. But I'm writing for a specific market. But I'm trying to get published here!

Write for yourself.

Some of the fun goes out of writing when we try to bend too much to the world. I think of the rule-breakers that have made a mark on the literary world: C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia sure aren't written the way you'd expect middle grade to be written. Nor is Where the Red Fern Grows, which starts out with an old man reminiscing on his childhood. Sure, the rules were different in other decades, but how different really?

Today, the rule-breakers are trend-setters, especially in YA. Twilight didn't follow any rules of plot that I'm familiar with, and yet it reached me on an emotional level from the beginning. I wouldn't call The Hunger Games a rule-follower, either. It set the bar for dystopian societies very high by being its own kind of book.

Agents say, "Write the best story you can."

That is the only rule.

Sometimes when they say that, I hear: "Write a better story than you possibly can," and I get a little depressed. Past rejection has a way of lingering way past its expiration date like little silver ghosts that float around my head and remind me, "not right for my list," "too similar to something else," "no place for this in the market."

It's so hard some days to write with those horrible little poltergeists swarming me from all sides. I wish I had a Patronus spell to cast them back a mile or two, just so I can...

Write for myself.

Expecto Patronum!


Did it work?

Ah, it did work.

The Year to Believe requires that we put our past failures in the past and not allow them to muck up the future we have planned for ourselves and our characters.

Write for yourself.

Believe in your voice.

Happy 2012!