Hello, first of all I wanted to say that your blog and you are gorgeous! And I have a question, do you have any tips on how to stop comparing your writing ideas with others, everything that other people write seems to be so unique and original… Or how to get more original ideas for your writing? Thank you so much in advance!

brynwrites:

When your writing doesn’t feel original or worthwhile.

Aw, thank you, nonny ❤

To be entirely honest with you, if it’s something you tend to struggle with, then there’s probably no way to remove the feeling entirely. Many authors, even bestselling authors with dozens of published books, feel like this on a regular basis. Just keep reminding yourself that:

• Your ideas won’t seem as mysterious or intriguing as anyone else’s because they’re yours – but there are other writers out there looking at your ideas you deem unoriginal and wishing they could be as creative as you are.

• All ideas have been done before, and it’s how well you do them that counts far more than what they actually are. 

• You chose your story for a reason. What did you love about it before you started looking at the grass on the other side of the fence?

• The longer you work on the same idea, the less creative it often feels to you. Something which seemed unique last month feels mediocre after two months and a year later it’s the worst idea ever. But that’s okay, because no one else but you (and maybe your editor or agent) is going to spend months or years submerged in the violent battle of making this story actually work, so no one else is going to get bored of it.

True originality is a lie, but if you want to create more wacky and unique plots, check out this post here! You might also be interested in my analysis of convention vs originality, if you haven’t seen it yet.

To slightly paraphrase one of my (many) favorite @neil-gaiman quotes:

The last novel I wrote, when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book.

She simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”

I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not really.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.”

We all feel like our writing isn’t good enough.

(Just today in fact, I had a miniature meltdown because I decided all my characters from The Warlord Contracts were just carbon copies of a cardboard cut out. I know a large part of the chaos in all three books is caused by the fact that the main characters are so incredibly different that they can’t agree on anything, ever, and the scene I was writing had an entire paragraph of Vasha trying to convince himself that Mantas isn’t a bad leader just because her ideas are often in direct opposition to his own, and yet some dark insecure goblin in my brain manages to win its foundless argument anyways.)

We, and our brain goblins, may not always feel just our ideas or writing are great or even good, but I promise this is a natural feeling for writers — one which will only bleed into your stories if you let it taunt you into ending them.