What Makes Me So Special?

Picking up from my last post about a writer's individuality (It's All Been Done) . . .

Marrije commented: "I have no clue what I see different from everybody else, and even less clue about what would make my views interesting to others. And indeed, what if I'm not interesting?"

I know exactly what she means. When I was doing my master's degree at U of Calgary, I felt like I was surrounded by people who all had something to distinguish themselves: some ethnicity, philosophy, religion, sexual orientation that set them apart. I felt so white-bread middle-class boring. From my journal, September 25, 1997, describing a meeting with my thesis advisor:

Finally I voiced my fear that my manuscript would not be published (premature I know, but also paralyzing for my writing). She looked at me evenly and said that she knew someone would publish it. But I'm not the right kind of writer, I said, I'm not a writer of colour or a feminist . . . . She cut me off and said, don't even go down that road. You can't change who you are. But my subject matter, I said, it's not political, it's not about social issues. Yes it is, she said, and even so, if it's well written people will want to read it no matter what it's about. Bottom line, she said, was that I had to write what I could live with, not for some imaginary audience, and that if I wanted to write I had to put those doubts aside and believe in myself.

I think we are so familiar with ourselves that it's hard to see what makes us unique. So part of the process must therefore be to look at ourselves as others might see us, compare our style and subject matter to that of others, and learn to recognize the distinctions and believe in our value. I liked Rick Moody's quote about this:

[My style is] a more natural albeit slightly more hysterical kind of line length. I just hit it. I just landed the vein in a way. And I suddenly realized that it was okay for me to write these long, torrid sentences and that people would still read the work and many people would be really excited by it.

I have a stylistic tendency that I've subconsciously tried to suppress: I like to use big words. But as a school kid I got my knuckles rapped for "showing off your vocabulary," "using words you don't understand," and "sounding like a thesaurus." Granted, those are things I want to avoid, but since I recognized that I had internalized those critical voices, I'm trying to let the big words come out, and figure out how to incorporate them into a story in a way that works organically. I'm happy to be reclaiming something that makes me special.