Accidental Writing Similarities

Writing is an art. Within this art, there are so many ways one can express oneself. We live in a society with diverse types of material from every corner of the world and even in the restraints of small groupings of residences and people. However, many writers stick to what they know.

It’s understandable. Less outside research needs to be done. Plus, one can have a closer perspective to the subject than if one chose something more unfamiliar. The process may also be more enjoyable if one prefers the trappings of home.

However, there is a flip side to staying in one’s comfort zone. When a specific topic exists, a rough limit to how many complete unique takes can be written does exist. It’s not like it’s impossible for the writeups about it to be written in fresh ways. But they will likely be influenced by other works on the same topic. As such, they run the risk of looking similar.

Don’t get me wrong, plagiarism isn’t inevitable. If it was, academic and research institutions wouldn’t have such harsh punishments for it.

That being said, it is very well possible to be subconsciously influenced by someone else’s thinking when it’s penned down or typed out. You might not even realize it until you’re in rather deep and end up needing significant changes to ensure that people don’t suspect you’re intentionally ripping off someone else - or perhaps repeating yourself.

Another disadvantage which can come with writing based on things you are familiar with as time goes on is accidentally writing about something you’ve already written about again. While audiences do like series and consistency, too much repetition with little new to offer will bore plenty of readers.

This has sometimes happened to me - and it’s occurred more often than I’d like to admit. I write about something I feel is super interesting and fulfilling to write about. So far, so great.

But then I start to vaguely remember writing about a similar topic before. A quick search through all my articles, and lo and behold - I’ve written about nearly the exact same thing before. Would you look at that?

Maybe this very piece I’m writing right now is somewhat guilty of the same thing. I have written about writing more than once before. Heck, the similarities between this article and previous ones of mine go beyond the broad category of all of them being meta-writing pieces.

If you’ve been going through my Medium profile for a bit, you might have noticed that I’ve written about writer’s block before. It was a long time ago - before I stepped up my formatting and writing style for informational piece writing.

The aforementioned article didn’t gain much traction upon its initial publication on Medium beyond a slightly used clap feature, so I crossposted it to Vocal Media. As of right now, I’m not sure how well crossposting my writer’s block article is going to work.

Regardless, I feel like this experience has driven the point home for me about how similarity in content can affect the popularity of anything written in general.

There are plenty of pieces about writer’s block out there. While I didn’t plagiarize, I was heavily inspired by others’ advice on creative blockage when it came to writing my piece. Perhaps this resulted in me holding back from adding something fresh to the table and the resulting product being rather…restrained, to say the least.

On the other hand, I never really emphasized analyzing how writing similarities affect the quality of a piece or story in my previous article about writer’s block. Ultimately, I feel like the current writeup you’re reading is different enough to warrant existing.

Any other thoughts on this? Let me know in the comments!

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