Uncovering Your Unique Creative Writing Skills
Superpowers are like dreams. Everyone has them, but not everyone can clearly define what they’re experiencing.
When a writer acknowledges their superpower, they stop writing for everyone else and start writing for themselves. They choose projects that feel enroute toward success rather than something that drains their ambition and leaves them feeling depressed, or heartbroken, or simply apprehensive of the writing process as a whole.
Discovering your superpower is important. It reveals the secret place where your natural writing intersects with your highest impact on readers. So, how do you discover your writer superpower? To be honest, it’s easier than you think. You just have to open yourself to the world of possibility.
Track What Comes Easy
Let’s start with what you enjoy writing most. Are you a short-story or novel length writer? Maybe you’re an essay-a-holic? Do you hate the dreaded full-sentence prose concept and prefer writing alliteration, consonance, and literary imagery that sparks the readers senses in short phrases? Then poems are your gig.
If you have a love of writing run-on sentences that spends seven pages talking about a spoon, then literary fiction is for you! Maybe you love the idea of creating future documentaries; well, pull up a chair because you show an inclination toward dystopian writing.
Once you’ve determined what genre, length, and style of writing comes easily to you, then start looking at your writing patterns.
Analyze Your Writing Patterns
Pull out three to five of your most recent writing pieces. Whether they are short stories, poems, or chapters of your novel, choose a few of the ones you feel most proud to show off. Next, you’re going to have to put on your reader hat and hide your writer hat for a moment. Search for consistencies and patterns in how you write. For example, I personally love writing in three’s; which means that the Oxford comma is one of my best friends.
One of my favorite writers takes her personal experience of nontraditional families and uses this as a theme in all of her novels. She shows readers how teens and middle-grade characters overcome the challenge of having step-siblings, half-siblings, step-parents, and a whole bunch of eccentric family life. In fact, it’s written so well that readers who are unfamiliar with this family upbringing, can gain a deeper understanding of something outside of their norm.
Your Obsessions
Your writing obsessions aren’t abnormal. If anything, they are a compass giving your creativity direction. Make sure you listen to that inner voice, because that whisper is your internal guide helping you share your passion and gift with the rest of the world.
When you’re sitting in front of a blank screen, ready to metaphorically type Once Upon a Time, what emotions arise when you first put those fingertips on the keyboard? What sends happy chills down your spine? Where do your thoughts go? Pay attention to where your mind wanders first. Is it…
- Character Development?
- Shadow Work?
- Sensory Details?
- Linguistics?
- World Building?
- Plot Structure?
This is of course, not a full list of possibilities, but hopefully you get a sense of what I’m talking about. When you take the time to dissect what comes easily to you, when you take the time to analyze your patterns, and accept your obsessions, you re-discover your voice. And when you feel confident in having your voice heard, your authentic-self shines like a beacon to readers.
Happy Writing,
-RADolence