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What If You’re Not the Kind of Writer You Thought You’d Be?

April 30, 2025
What If You’re Not the Kind of Writer You Thought You’d Be?

— a podcast episode —

What if I’m not the kind of writer I thought I’d be?
Many writers start with a fixed idea of the kind of stories they’re supposed to write, but creative growth often reveals a different voice or genre that feels more authentic. Embracing this shift isn’t failure; it’s part of discovering your true identity as a writer.

Helping writers craft authentic, immersive stories.
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Inside Creative Writing

Table Of Contents Formatted and Edited Transcript Talk to Us! Share This Resource

What if the writer you thought you’d be isn’t the writer you actually are? This episode dives into one of the most important (but rarely discussed) challenges writers face: discovering that their creative voice may not match the genre, tone, or style they originally envisioned. Whether you’re feeling creatively stuck or wondering if a pivot is necessary, this conversation will help you listen to what your writing is trying to tell you.

Key takeaways from this episode:

  • How to recognize the difference between resistance and authentic redirection
  • Why early success can trap you in a version of yourself that no longer fits
  • Practical tools to explore a shift in genre or voice without scrapping your work
  • How to use flow state and “guilty relief” to evaluate new story ideas
  • Encouragement from authors like George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, and Franz Kafka, who reinvented their work mid-career

You don’t have to be the writer you set out to be. In fact, discovering who you really are on the page might be the most exciting part of the journey. Ready to go deeper? Explore the How to Write a Novel page or try the Story Rescue Checklist to see if your current project needs a fresh look.

Formatted and Edited Transcript

When you started writing, you probably had a clear idea of the kind of writer you were going to be. But what if you were wrong? And what if that’s actually a good thing? Let’s dive in.

Welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing podcast. This is Brad Reed. I’m thrilled to be here with you again today.

I want to talk about something that almost every writer struggles with at some point, but we don’t often say it out loud. We don’t often talk about it. And that thing is the question, what if I’m not the kind of writer I thought I was going to be?

Expectations vs. Reality

When most of us start writing, we have this clear idea in our heads, right? We picture ourselves maybe writing sweeping fantasy sagas or gritty detective novels or maybe some deeply emotional literary fiction. We might even imagine ourselves sticking to a particular genre or a specific audience or a specific style. We tend to think we should be writing the type of work that we love to read, and sometimes that is the case, but not always.

Sometimes that love of a specific type of story is only the thing we need to start writing in order to find what we’re truly meant to write.

Now the same thing happens to musicians and singers all the time. Some start out aiming for pop stardom but find their voice in folk or blues. Others might dream of being country stars, but they realize once they get started that their passion actually lies in indie rock or jazz or something like that.

Even huge names like Taylor Swift pivoted dramatically during her career, which is still ongoing and still pivoting, right? Moving from country to pop to indie folk, all sorts of stuff. Over time, artists often need that first step into a familiar genre just to get started, only to realize that their true sound lives somewhere entirely different.

Alanis Morissette is another great example of this. She started out as kind of a teen pop singer. She had some level of success with that, not nearly the success that she had when she shocked the world with Jagged Little Pill, an album that is so far away from teen pop that I don’t think you could get much farther away.

When Writing Takes a Turn

So writers experience this same thing. We step into writing thinking we’re one thing and we’re writing one kind of story, but the deeper we go, the more something else starts to emerge. And then somewhere along the way, what actually comes out when we sit down to write doesn’t really match that picture we had going in. The stories we’re drawn to feel different. The voice feels different. Sometimes the whole process feels different, especially different than what we thought it would be.

When this happens, it can be really confusing and off-putting. It can feel like a failure.

I mean, imagine somebody like Franz Kafka. He wrote the classic The Metamorphosis. He started out actually trying to write plays and never got far with them. They weren’t very good. But he tried, right? That’s where he started. You can go back and read through some of his journals and some of the writing that he did around that time, and he just saw himself as an absolute failure because he couldn’t write these plays. He wasn’t having the success he envisioned having.

But he switched it up. He went on to start writing short stories and novels, and the world of writing would be dramatically different without his unique blend of surrealism and existential dread that has inspired countless writers.

I try to picture him in this tough spot where he’s not sure what he should be writing, and he’s down on himself. He had a terrible inner critic that just told him he was no good, that he would never succeed. And then he comes up with the story idea: I’m going to write a novel about a man who wakes up as essentially a giant cockroach. Probably didn’t feel like the most obvious next step for him as a writer. But fortunately for all of us, he followed that inclination and discovered his voice in that kind of writing.

Why Writing Takes So Long

Those early attempts at writing are actually just the beginning of becoming who we really are as writers. It’s the beginning of a journey that can take years and even decades sometimes.

We, as writers of novels, have really bitten off a lot to chew. And one reason this is so hard to see while it’s happening is because novel writing as an art form is very different from almost every other type of creative work.

Take painting, for example. You could create dozens of paintings in a year, probably even more. You sketch, you paint, you get it out there, you get some feedback, you take that into account, and you iterate. You change your approach, you experiment with other things and see what the reaction is to that.

If you’re a songwriter, you might write and record a song, play it for friends, perform it live, adjust it, grow from it. In fact, I read something the other day that said the Dire Straits song “I Want My MTV,” a classic rock song, was written in just a few minutes while he was looking at a store display in the window of a bunch of televisions that had MTV on it. And the song poured out.

We don’t get to do that as writers. Especially if we’re writing novels, the work is long-term. We don’t get that quick turnover where we can freely experiment with a bunch of different kinds of novels until we find what works for us. Even short films could be made relatively quickly and shared widely. Especially with today’s technology, you can make a home movie with your cell phone and a program on your computer and it’s up on YouTube. That can be in a matter of days.

But a novel? A novel is slow. Painfully slow, even when it’s going fast. It’s a slow process, and it often takes months, if not years, just to get the first draft down. Then more months, if not years, to revise it, polish the language, get it to shine. Then trying to get it out into the world, to get it published or find readers can take even more time.

Even if you do find a publisher, once you’ve signed that contract, it can be years before the book ever comes out. It is a long, painfully slow process. There’s no instant feedback like there is in almost any other art form.

Major motion pictures are maybe the one exception. But there’s not a lot of others where the timeframe to create our art is so very long.

And without that fast feedback and that ability to kind of pivot from one thing to another and try a bunch of things, it’s harder to realize when you’re forcing yourself down a path that doesn’t actually fit you. It’s easy to stay committed to an idea of who you thought you were supposed to be, even when your writing itself is trying to pull you in a different direction.

So it’s also important to remember that writers change over time because people change. I’m not the same person I was at 25, and I’m certainly not the person I was at 35. I’m not the person I was at 45, and I’m not going to tell you how old I am now, but it’s somewhere above 45. Your interests evolve. Your emotional range deepens. Your experience that you can draw from multiplies. Of course you’re a different person, a different writer as you go through your life. It would be really strange if your writing stayed exactly the same forever, so letting yourself grow and letting your stories grow with you is part of this process, part of this artistic journey that we’re on.

So the stories that you needed to tell five years ago aren’t necessarily the ones you need to tell today. I have a terrible habit of beginning stories and never finishing them because I lose that passion and that drive. And I always think when I set them aside, I’m going to get back to them someday. And when I go back to them, I think that’s not a story I want to tell. I’m a different person with different skill sets, different points of view than I was back then, and I don’t want it now. I may borrow pieces of it, but I take that as a sign that I am alive as a writer, paying attention and evolving as a writer. So instead of looking at those things as failures that I never went back and completed, I look at them as stepping stones on that path to the writer that I’m becoming. And the same is true of you.

Writers Who Evolve

Some of the most iconic writers in the world have gone through massive shifts in their careers. Let’s start with a writer who’s going through some rough times right now, Neil Gaiman, but we’re going to talk about him anyway because he’s a great example of this. He started out writing comics, right? The Sandman series. Very successful with that. But he didn’t just keep cranking out comics. He moved into novels, writing books like American Gods, children’s books like Coraline. He writes screenplays, poetry, nonfiction, essays. He refused to stay in one lane. He figured out what his writing was and then he didn’t just get stuck in that. He moved with that journey.

Margaret Atwood is another one. Often we think of The Handmaid’s Tale, that dystopian fiction, but she’s also written speculative fiction, historical novels, poetry, short stories.

Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day, which is kind of a delicate, restrained historical novel, and then he turned around and wrote Never Let Me Go, which is a dystopian sci-fi story about cloning and existential despair. I’m not sure you could get two more different directions from a single writer, yet he had the boldness and the curiosity to go there.

Even outside of writing, look at someone like Picasso. He didn’t stay trapped in his blue period. He moved into cubism, into surrealism, into whole new ways of seeing and expressing himself.

And we’ve already talked about music, but we see it all the time in music. David Bowie, reinventing himself again and again. He didn’t just stay Ziggy Stardust for his entire career.

These artists understood something vital that we can learn from. You don’t discover who you are creatively by deciding what that is ahead of time. You discover it by doing the work and letting that work change you.

The Trap of Early Success

Now there’s a huge amount of pressure on writers, on any kind of artist really, but especially on writers. And I’m going to get to that in a moment. I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Before we get into that, let’s talk about what I’m going to call early success. That doesn’t have to mean I wrote a bestseller or sold millions of copies. That could be whatever you determine success to be. That could be a couple hundred people bought my book and gave me great reviews on Amazon. Maybe it was way more than that, maybe it was less. Maybe you wrote a book that your family loved and they raved about it, and not many other people were interested in it. But you still took that as a success.

So whatever you define as early success, that can become a trap. When a first novel finds some success, even in a small way, there’s enormous pressure on us to keep delivering that same thing: the same genre, the same tone, the same expectations. We want to take that success, big or small, and build on it, because we put so much work into even getting that small piece of success. We don’t want to feel like we’re throwing that away by switching directions and doing something completely apart from it.

That pressure can freeze us creatively. It can start to make us afraid to take risks, afraid of changing, afraid of examining ourselves for what kind of writer we’re becoming, and not just looking backwards to what kind of writer we’ve been.

Sometimes that slow growth is actually a gift. It gives you the freedom to explore different directions before an audience locks you into an identity that might not fit anymore.

The Problem of the Platform

So let’s talk about what I was just getting lured into talking about a moment ago, which is what I’m going to call the problem of the platform.

Today, this kind of patience with growing into who you are as a writer is harder than ever before. We, as writers, are told almost from the beginning that we need to “build a platform.” We need to define our brand. We need to pick a genre, we need to pick a tone, we need to pick a specific audience, and we need to market ourselves almost before pen even hits the page or before fingers hit the keyboard.

We’re told we need to be thinking about marketability. We need to think about the hole in the market that we’re going to fill. We need to think about our voice and what it’s going to say in the world through whatever genre we choose.

The truth is, early on we are still just becoming writers. We’re still discovering our voices, our stories, our emotional range. And if you lock yourself into a brand too soon, it’s going to feel suffocating. It can make you afraid to experiment. Honestly, it can make you afraid to change.

Now I’ve fallen for this myself, which is why I’m so passionate about talking about it. And honestly, I’m still influenced by this as well. So really, this podcast is as much me talking to myself as it is me talking to you.

I love road stories. Books, films, TV shows, anything with a road story where people have to kind of chuck their old life behind and get out in the world and travel in some way, discover new things. Those stories just resonate with me, and I actually really do love writing them. I’ve kind of started to define the writing that I do as road story novelist. But sometimes an idea pops into my head, a new idea, and it feels exciting. It feels interesting. It’s the kind of idea that has me walking around a little bit in a daze throughout my day, thinking about characters and settings and plot points, and it just consumes me.

There’s a part of me that says, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. That’s not a road story. That’s not what you do. You’re this other thing. And what I’ll do is I’ll start thinking, OK, you’re right. It’s not a road story, but maybe I can force it into being a road story. So I’ll play around with it, and I’ll move the plot around and the characters, and I’ll try to force it into this preconceived notion I have of me as a road story writer. And I either just destroy that story, or I just chuck it. I say, oh no, this isn’t the right story for me. It doesn’t fit what I’ve written before.

Right now, I have the tiniest little bit of a platform. Microscopic. And the vast majority of writers out there, maybe you as well, have what we would call a microscopic platform. But we’ve worked hard for that, right? We’ve written for hours and hours and hours, and revised for hours and hours. We’ve sweat and bled for our art to get it out there in the world. Maybe we’ve found some fans, some people that appreciate our writing. We don’t want to walk away from that. We don’t want to chuck that. And we can easily talk ourselves into feeling like that’s what we’re doing, right? We’re taking everything we’ve worked for, whatever reputation we have, and we’re throwing it out.

But I’m here to tell you, a tiny platform is just that. It’s tiny. It’s fluid. And the people who love you and love your writing will follow you wherever you lead them with the kind of writing that you want to evolve into. So we can afford to pivot if we need to. We can afford to follow those creative instincts. We can afford to let our early work be messy and experimental and wonderfully weird.

Think back to Franz Kafka: “I think I’ll write a story about a man who wakes up transformed into a giant cockroach.” We can be weird. Our little inner critics, those voices that are always telling us those negative things, they love to tell us things like, you’re too old to change. Even at 20 years old, 30 years old, we can feel that pressure to have everything figured out and be making a name for ourselves, as though we’ve been writing for 40 years.

The truth is, life is long. I tell this to my students all the time, especially the seniors who are panicked about what they’re going to be. That’s the question we always ask seniors in high school. What are you going to do? Are you going to go to college? What are you going to study? What are you going to be? And there’s so much pressure around that. And I tell them, life is long. You’re going to be a lot of different things, and whatever you pick first is almost guaranteed to be the thing you’re not going to do the rest of your life. Especially in today’s world.

And I think that’s true with writing too. Life is long, even if we’re getting older. A dude like me still has a lot of words to write. And so do you, whatever age you are. So you don’t have to define yourself forever based on your first or your second or your third project. Your best work often lies in the directions that you didn’t expect to go. And those stories that jump out of the blue, grab you by the throat, and say, you will write me. Especially, and I say that on purpose in kind of that aggressive way, because the best stories, the ones that really get a hold of us, are the ones that scare us a little bit. They make us a little nervous. They make us feel, oh, I don’t know if I can take that on. I don’t know if I should take that on. But they get a hold of us. They get in our skin and demand to be told.

Signs You Might Be Writing the Wrong Story

So I want to talk a little bit here because I may have you questioning. Thanks, Brad. I’m right in the middle of a story and now I’m not even sure that I should be going that direction because I’m having some doubts and the story’s not working out. Well, I want to help you with some tools here to kind of look into your natural instincts and see if you’re following that true writer in you or if you’re being misled by some of the pressures and resistance that are out there.

So if you’re not sure whether this applies to you, a few signs that you might be fighting your natural writing instinct.

First of all, you dread working on the “official” project that you’re committed to, but your mind keeps wandering off to other ideas. Is that a sign that you’re writing the wrong thing? Maybe. Maybe. We’re going to come back to this in a little bit because we don’t want to confuse that with resistance. And we’ve talked before about resistance in this podcast, so I don’t want to go deeply into it other than to say that art, if we’re attempting art of any kind, then resistance shows up to try to keep us from doing that. Whether it’s distractions or self-doubt or anything, resistance rises up.

So we can’t just say, boy, I’m having a hard time writing this book. We don’t want to take it just on that. It could be one of the pieces of evidence. What we really want to look at is something that we call flow state. When you’re writing your, I guess we’ll keep calling it the official project, the project that you’ve deemed the serious one that you’re working toward finishing, when you’re writing that, do you hit that flow state where all of a sudden time ceases to exist, everything else in the world ceases to exist, and you get in that zone where the words are just going onto the page, the ideas are popping off like fireworks, and you’re just having a great time writing the story?

I’m not saying it has to be like that all the time, because writing is never like that all the time. But if we are finding that flow state at times when writing that story, it’s probably a good sign that we’re headed in a good direction with that story. But if we’re getting distracted and stuff because we’re struggling with the story and we can’t quite get into it, that may be a sign that it’s a story that we don’t need to be writing at that point.

So let’s look at number two here. Another sign that might tell us we’re fighting our natural writing self, and again, these are all abstract. None of these are going to be black and white, clear answers. But when we look at them all together, they can tell us something important.

If you feel kind of a strange sense of envy, or maybe longing is the better word, when you read certain types of stories that you think you’re not supposed to write. So you’re reading something outside of your zone that you’ve kind of defined yourself as a writer of, and you’re thinking, wow, I wish I could. I wish I could write something like this. Maybe it’s not even the quality of the writing so much as the type of story that it is. So let’s say that you are a fantasy writer and you’re reading sci-fi, and you’re going, wow, I’m really jealous that this writer gets to write about spaceships. And I don’t write that genre, so I’m not going to be a good one to come up with examples, but you get what I’m saying, right? We have that little kind of envy, that oh, if I could write that, that would be awesome.

Third, you’re excited when you’re brainstorming, but you’re drained when you’re actually drafting the story. Now this happens to me a lot, and I hate to even share this as a sign that we might be in the wrong place because it happens to me so much. I love the initial creation of a new story. I love coming up with characters and names and plots and settings and thinking about the big picture. And then it’s time to put it on the page. I can lose that passion. I can lose that interest in it, and I start to feel like I’m obligated to write that story then, because I started it, not because it’s a story I’m truly invested in. So one of the things I’m working on in this area is recognizing that and not feeling like it’s a waste to throw all that brainstorming out and not write that story, but look at it as yet another step toward the story that I do want to write. That does pull that passion and interest and that will sustain that long, long, long drafting process.

And then finally, if you’re feeling trapped by expectations. If you’re writing a story and you feel like there are expectations you’re trying to meet, either your own or expectations you’ve picked up from others. Maybe you’re comparing yourself to younger authors who’ve made it big already. Maybe you’re comparing yourself to writers who have an entire library of books they’ve written in a specific genre, who seem to know exactly who they are as writers. And we think we have to be that. I have to keep writing this genre. I have to keep writing this type of story because that’s what I need to be as one of these amazing writers with libraries of their own books that they’ve written.

So if we’re feeling that sense of being trapped by expectations, that can be another one of those signs that we’re not writing a story that is authentic to who we are at that time.

So if any of those sound familiar, you might not be writing the kind of work that’s most alive in you. But like I said, it can be really difficult to tell. So I want to dive deeper into one way that we can figure it out. It’s at least helped me, and maybe it will help you.

Shiny Object Syndrome

So we’re going to talk about shiny object syndrome. If you’ve heard of this before, then you know exactly what it is. If you haven’t heard of it before, I’ll bet you have it anyway.

Shiny object syndrome is the tendency to chase new ideas just because they seem easier or more exciting than the tough work of finishing what we’ve started. So we’re in that slog of actually writing the story, and it is a slog, even if we’re passionate about it and interested in it, it’s still hard work. And all of a sudden, these ideas start popping up. Or we see something on television, like, oh, that would make a good story, or something on the news. Or you read a book that inspires this new thought, this new direction that you might have taken that book, and you think, oh, there’s this other story idea that maybe I’m meant to write that.

That’s shiny object syndrome, and it’s really just a form of resistance. It’s trying to pull us away from the work that we’re doing. But sometimes, that shiny object can be the thing that you’re supposed to be writing.

So how do we tell the difference? It’s all about not just fear, but the type of fear. So go with me on this and see if this resonates with you.

Resistance—and when I talk about resistance, I’m talking about you’re writing the book you were meant to write, and this is just the natural difficulty that comes up in getting it down on paper—resistance often feels shallow and frantic. It’s about the fear of doing the hard work, the fear of failure, the fear of not being good enough.

So you’re in a story that you’re passionate about and you’re writing it, but you have this resistance that’s making it difficult because I have a fear that I’m not doing the story justice, or I have a fear that if I finish it, I’m going to get it out in the world and people aren’t going to like it. I’m going to fail. I’m not going to be good enough. That resistance feels shallow and kind of frantic.

But the voice that leads you toward your true writing self feels different. It still, at least initially, feels like a kind of fear, but it’s more of a little nagging fear, more of a persistent kind of quiet fear. It’s not about escaping hard work. It’s not about making things easier. It’s not this shiny object like, oh, if I go write this, then that’s going to be fun and I don’t have to write this other thing anymore. It’s about feeling drawn in, pulled, or invited into something deeper, even when it scares you. And maybe especially if it scares you, if it feels more challenging.

So if you’re writing a story now and you’re having difficulty with it, look at that shiny object and say, is that going to be easier or harder than what I’m writing now? If you’re saying that’s going to be easier and I can relax and just write that thing and it’s going to be more fun, that’s probably shiny object syndrome. But if you look at that and you go, oh wow, that would be a real challenge. That would be something new and different for me that I’d really have to work at. It’s hard to do because you’re already exhausted from what you’re trying to do. But if it’s that kind of fear, then that’s a really strong sign that that’s the story you should actually be writing.

So the key here is honesty. Are you trying to run away from difficulty? If so, then that’s resistance. And let’s face it, writing books is hard. Even if you are writing the perfect story for you, if there is such a thing. Or are you feeling an honest pull toward something that’s more alive inside you? That’s the real writer in you trying to tell you where to go next.

OK, one other trick here. When you think about the new idea, like the shiny object one, do you feel what I’m going to call guilty relief? Like you’re relieved that you don’t have to keep challenging yourself on your current project? Or that feeling of yeah, I know how to write that, it’s going to be so much easier. Or do you feel kind of a deep, thrilling terror? Right? Fear. Oh, can I do that? Can I actually pull that off?

If it’s guilt-driven relief, it’s probably resistance. If it’s scary and exciting, it might be your real creative self trying to speak to you.

So a key to this is don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t chuck the story you’re working on right now and jump off to that shiny thing because it got your attention. Give yourself time. Give yourself space to listen carefully before making a decision. But some things that you can do; we can experiment a bit. We can take little trials into pivoting. Not everything has to be a full-blown book. It could just be an opening of a book. It could be a chapter of a book. We could play with some of these ideas and see if it feels like that authentic place that we want to go.

You can do things like write short pieces in different genres or voices just to see what excites you. Write an opening. Write a chapter. Write a short story in this genre or this style that’s kind of pulling at you, just to see what happens. What does it feel like? Does it feel like it’s challenging you? Is it getting those pistons to fire, getting that passion to bubble up?

Here’s one that’s actually worked well for me, and I kind of just stumbled into it because I was playing with a graphic design piece of software, and I thought, well, I’m going to make a book cover. So one of the things you can do is actually design a cover for a book outside of your expected genre and slap your name on it and just look at it. Ponder it for a while. Have it up on your computer or wherever it is and just glance at it every once in a while and see if it’s pulling at you. Is it inviting you to actually want to invest in writing a book like that?

Some people have luck with writing a fake back cover blurb. So you’re not doing the cover now, we’re doing the back cover, and we’re writing out how would somebody describe this story that I want to write? What does that feel like? What does that look like to you? Is it pulling you into that story?

Another good place to look is back at your past writing. Really look, scene by scene. Are there scenes in some of the stories you’ve written before, maybe they’re scenes, maybe they’re just moments, maybe they’re characters or character dynamics, where you really felt alive doing that kind of writing? You felt challenged doing that kind of writing? That can be that little muse inside you pulling you toward a different kind of story to tell.

Let’s say you’ve written a long literary fiction piece, but it had a few little action-adventure kind of scenes in there. And you remember writing those, and how you felt alive and it felt challenging, trying to put it together, and you just really connected with those parts. That might be that little inner voice saying, hey, we want to write some action-adventure stuff. We want to go challenge ourselves in that direction.

If you do discover something new that you want to try, and I would bet that in our writing careers we all will at some point or another, you don’t have to announce a big rebrand. You don’t have to change your website around. You don’t have to send out a social media post talking about hey everybody, now I’m this kind of writer. You don’t have to justify that shift to anyone. You’re an artist. As writers, we are artists. And we follow our muse. I keep going back to that. We follow our muse, or that authentic voice that we have in us. We follow our excitement to where it leads.

So give yourself permission to be curious about what your writing is trying to teach you. In fact, I recently heard from a listener, and I love that he reached out with this story because it meant so much to me and helped inspire this episode, in fact, but he started drafting what he said was going to be a smut story. A smutty story. Which, right, more power to you. But he said once he started actually writing, the characters in it really deepened, and their relationships became more layered, more complex, and it quit being a smut story.

He’s still in the process of it, so he’s not sure where it’s going yet, it doesn’t sound like. But it’s changing. He’s following where that story, where his writer voice wants it to go. So it’s kind of pivoting into what sounds like a quiet, character-driven novel about self-discovery and emotional connection. So he hadn’t set out to write that kind of book, but the work led him there. That voice inside led him there by what he was excited about writing, and what he felt challenged to write. And he was bold enough to follow, which is huge. Huge.

That’s the kind of creative discovery that only happens when we stay open to what our writing wants to become.

Wise Words

All right, let’s look at some wise words here, because I don’t want you to just hear it from me. We’re going to tap into a couple of authors here and see their take on this.

So George Saunders, one of the most creative, self-challenging authors there is, he wrote Lincoln in the Bardo. Actually, not that recently, I guess, but a while ago. Lincoln in the Bardo is one of the most creative books I’ve ever read. If you haven’t read it, I really recommend the audiobook version of it because it is produced so well with some great voice actors. I’ve never read a book quite like it, and just a really bold creative take on writing that I’m sure probably scared him a bit to do. He probably went into that with a lot of fear, but a lot of excitement as well.

So anyway, what George Saunders says here is,

“The best work emerges when we stop trying to write what we think we should and start writing what we’re curious about.”

Oh, that’s huge. Start writing what we’re curious about. If we have all the answers and all the knowledge, why are we writing it, right? Start writing what we’re curious about. Love that.

And then Terry Tempest Williams says this:

“Writing is a process of discovery. You never know what you might find or where it might lead you.”

This is a great question that comes from that. Is your writing a process of discovery? Is my writing a process of discovery? Well, in some ways, yes. I’m discovering a story. But am I challenging myself to discover more of what I’m capable of writing? More of what I’m interested in writing about? And discovering what fears I have about writing that I can push through and find even better writing on the other side?

Writing Challenge for the Week

So let’s get into our writing challenge for this week.

This week, I want to challenge you to try something just for yourself. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Write about 500 words. This isn’t homework, so shorter, longer, it’s your choice. But I would suggest about 500 words in a genre or style that you either kind of secretly love, or you’re at least curious about. You’ve had the little fleeting thought, it might be fun to write something like that someday.

Give yourself license to pursue that a little bit, even in a very short 500 words or so. Pursue it because it’s not you. It doesn’t have to be a serious attempt. It doesn’t have to be good. You don’t have to show it to anybody when you’re done. But just give yourself license to play and see if you discover something about who you are as a writer and what kind of stories maybe that writer inside you wants to tell.

Need some inspiration? Check out our Five Minute Writing Prompts!

If you have an experience with that that you want to share, I would love, love, love to hear from you about that. You can leave a comment below about how this writing challenge went for you. You can also comment about the podcast itself, this episode. Did you like it? Was it helpful? Do you disagree with it? Do you have another take on it? I would love to hear all of that good stuff and we can talk about it there in the comments.

Before we wrap up, I want to circle back to where we started. Those artists that we talked about earlier. So imagine if David Bowie had stayed Ziggy Stardust forever. Imagine what the world misses out on. Or imagine if Margaret Atwood thought dystopian fiction was the only thing she was allowed to write. Or imagine if Alanis Morissette wasn’t bold enough to give up her pop music for Jagged Little Pill, which I still listen to today, and it still freaking rocks. We would have missed out on so much.

So our job isn’t to guess ahead of time what we’re supposed to be. Our job is to stay curious. To stay open. To keep moving forward even when the path surprises us. Maybe especially when the path surprises us.

So you don’t become the writer that you thought you would be. We become the writers that we actually are, and we just don’t know it yet. We’re discovering those writers as we go. And that’s a much more interesting journey than trying to figure it out at the beginning and never varying from it.

So thanks for being here today. I’d love to hear from you if this resonated. You can shoot me an email at brad.reed@insidecreativewriting.com if you don’t want to leave a comment on the page and share your thoughts. I’d love to hear that.

If you’re struggling with your current project right now and you’re curious if it’s trying to tell you that it’s not the right project to be working on, it might just be that your story has gotten off track a bit. So I’ve put together something that I’m really proud of. It’s called the Story Rescue Checklist, and what it does is it helps you see if there’s something structurally wrong with your story that’s causing it to not work well or causing you frustrations, to help you fix that before you give up on it and decide that you need to go chase after that shiny object that you just thought about.

So that story might be the right story to be writing, but it may just be missing some vital pieces. You can pick it up for free by going here and I’d love to send you that.

So until next time, keep writing. Because that is, of course, the best way to get better as a writer, by writing. Keep exploring. Keep pushing yourself. Keep finding those things to write about that scare you just a little bit. And I will look forward to seeing you back here again soon. Thanks for listening.

Interested in more podcasts about How to Write a Novel?

Talk to Us!

We’d love to hear from you! If you have a question, a comment, a suggestion, or just want to tell us about your work-in-progress, give us a shout!
info@insidecreativewriting.com

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Corvallis, Oregon
Craft immersive, authentic stories with practical techniques, deep insights, and real-world writing strategies.
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