A Method to Make Your Writing Unique

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

― Stephen King

Reading just as much as you write, if not a lot more, is essential to your growth as a writer. It doesn’t matter what kind of writer you are; playwrights need to practice as much as poets and web content writers.

The more you read, the more you can understand the nuance of writing your genre well. You can also get a better understanding of what your prospective genre’s market is looking for.

As a writer, you need to market yourself and your work. You are a marketer and your writing is the product you’re marketing. If you want more readers, the backbone of what you’re doing is marketing.

People want to read your unique perspective; they don’t want another generic writer sitting on the shelf.

They want the product that’s special and unique—not the store brand.

Currently, the two things I spend the most time writing would be poetry and web content. In my free time, I try to read poetry books, read the works of poets on Instagram, and read posts by successful content creators. I also read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi novels, but that’s not important right now.

The more I read, the more I came to a sad realization.

Our feelings might not be as unique as we think they are.

There’s good and bad about this. Let’s start with the bright side — in whatever you’re going through or feeling, you’re not alone. There are others out there who have endured similar and felt similar. It’s nice not to feel completely isolated in your experiences.

However, that does have some implications for your writing. If you only write about your feelings, that isn’t going to tell the entire story, and it might end up making your work sound generic.

I’ve seen this first-hand in my own writing. I often write about a burning desire to prove people wrong and a fiery ambition to bounce back when pushed down or mistreated. There are so many ways these feelings can manifest, everything from bad relationships to unfair and borderline illegal corporate practices.

If I only write about the emotions in very general words, both my poems and my web content end up sounding generic.

Anyone could have written them. They sound just like things other writers have gone through. I look back on my work and even I end up feeling like it’s not that interesting. What’s a reader going to think?

The thing about writing is that your reader will usually feel the same way you do. If you reread something you wrote and it doesn’t catch your interest, there’s a good chance it won’t catch someone else’s interest either. This sound might sound depressing, but it can be fixed.

Think about your life story and find the details that make you unique.

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Take some time with this. Let yourself be introspective and really think about you and your life story. Start making a list of the things that make your perspective and your experiences unique. Try to make a list of at least ten different things — these can be brief details or characteristics.

Here are a few examples from my own life to give you a clearer idea of how you can do this with your life. I often write about growing up in a small town and feeling isolated. This experience is generic — many, many people have lived through this. You might’ve lived through this.

When you get specific, you become unique.

But the good news is that I can still make that unique when I think back on the details. I grew up in a small town in a flood zone, where it was a normal event every spring and fall to wade through water up to my knees or thighs to check the mail or get to my car parked in high ground to go to work.

I laugh when I get flood warnings on my phone now that I live just outside of NYC because rain can’t begin to compare to coastal flooding during the spring and fall when the full moon comes around. How many people do you think lived through that? Certainly still some, but it’s a lot more unique and nuanced.

When writing about more universal feelings, let your voice and specific details make your perspective stand out.

“When we share those stories we've been scared to share, voicelessness loses it's wicked grasp.”

― Jo Ann Fore

Here’s one more example. Another thing that pervades my writing is a sense of unrest with corporate culture and frustration with unfair working conditions. This usually boils down to a desire to achieve more and better myself. This is something very relatable, but these feelings are pretty generic. This is common. Writing about just the feeling will start to feel generic to your reader if they read a lot of content on these topics. What makes you different from everyone else who has experienced this?

I gave this some thought and honestly just thought about my resume. The thing that makes my perspective a little more unique on this topic is that I worked in medicine. Pivoting the focus on the gray morality of working in medicine makes this perspective unique. Remembering being at hospital networking events drinking red wine and realizing that it’s the same color as patients paying thousands of dollars for blood transfusions upstairs is horrifying and haunting.

In everything you write, bring your unique experiences to the table with you.

It’s not as hard as you might think. Whenever the time comes in a story or a poem to draw on your own feelings or experiences, think about all the different things you’ve endured in relation to your topic. When it’s time to share personal stories or feelings, pull from what makes your experience different from anyone else’s.

It could be the place those things happen, it could be the way you reacted to the circumstances.

I can’t tell you what makes your experiences unique. That’s up to you — keep making those lists of what makes your story different from everyone else’s. The feelings may be relatable, and that is important, but cracking the door open and sharing the specific things that taught you these lessons is what will make your writing uniquely yours.

One way I’m doing this in my poetry is by embracing nautical imagery in my work. It’s what I know best. It’s what I can describe in ways that are uniquely my own and not internalized cliches from other sources. When it comes to writing about success and dealing with corporate culture, I can put the spin of my unique experiences working in corporate hospitals.

As you go about this process in your own work, remember Stephen King’s advice — read, read, and read some more. If you read the works of a lot of your “competition” and feel like you don’t stand out, it’s time to work harder at flavoring your work with everything that makes you unique.

This isn’t a one-time process. It’s continuous.

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it.”

― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

If you want to keep marketing your writing and growing your readership, you’ve got to put enough of you into your work that people know who you are. You’re marketing your writing, and just like marketing departments at big corporations, you’ve got to find the narrative that sticks. There are things in your story that are brilliantly unique. You’ve just got to share them.