The inferiority complex

How often do you look at the books on your shelves and wish you could write as well as those authors?  We all have our favourites, writers we're secretly jealous of and wish we could emulate.  But respect for other writer has its limits.  If we start imitating them and their work we lose our own individual voices as writers.  It's hard for us not to develop an inferiority complex when those other authors are published and we're not, but we must resist the impulse to imitate the best sellers.

The danger with imitating others is that we never develop our own individual voices as writers.  And it's our individual voices that will get us published.  We have to accept that our writing won't appeal to everyone.  We need to keep this in mind when we're receiving feedback on our work.  I have friends who are tech phobic and don't even try to engage with any tech in my stories.  I know that any critique those people make of the technology in my SF stories is ill-informed, and can usually be ignored.

We have to stop worrying about the fact that we can't be all things to all people.  We have to start thinking about who we really are as a writer, and have the courage to reveal that.  Some people won't like that, but you've got to be prepared to say "tough!" to them when they challenge your world.  

We need to bring our personalities into our writing.  I've read many science fiction books that have dazzled me with their picture of the shiny tech of their future world, of the strangeness of the culture of the people living in it.  But they weren't me.  I can't believe in all-powerful dictatorships that have ruled for aeons, in civilisations where human characters never have conflicting points of view.  There are always rebels in human society, even where the regimes are brutal and it's dangerous.  

That's often my stance in the writing.  My character is often an outcast from a society, someone claiming their uniqueness.  In my young adult novel Soulsinger, Cela, my native girl, is being forced into an arranged marriage by her father.  But Cela isn't going to submit to his brutality, so she runs away from her tribe.

My heart is with the rebel, and always will be. My mother used to try and control me by calling me a rebel.  She used it as a accusation, with the subtext "why don't you conform?" always whispering in the background.  But I've always had too strong a personality to do that, and I'm still rebelling against the popular cultural stereotypes in the way I live today.

So I'm not going to try and ape those writers whose hearts are in the midst of a glossy city.  Mine isn't, and I'm going to write about the places I love in future. My work will have my characters standing at the ocean's edge, gazing at a gorgeous sunset, because that's what I value.  I've finally learned to separate my respect for other writers' work from my own writing.  I am unique, I have a unique view of the future, and that's what I will write about in future.