Your Brilliant Writing Style and How to Find It

The quest for a unique style can tie a writer in knots until nothing’s being written. Why write if the output is boring or is a copy of someone else’s style or is something anyone could have written? If there’s not enough pizzazz to the words, how likely are we to reel someone in?

For many years, I struggled to find peace around writing what I wanted to write and sharing what I wrote. On one hand, I found joy, creativity, and internal connection writing edgy poems and dense fictional prose and story snippets with “out there” characters—stuff I didn’t think anyone would want to read. On the other hand, when I shared those pieces, I didn’t get reactions that made me feel understood.

In my first year of college, an author I admired taught a class and gave us an assignment to write a short story. I put everything I had into that story and got an A, which mystified me, because the teacher’s accompanying comment was: “Beautiful story, though I don’t understand it.” I felt like my style aced the assignment while my message remained unheard.

I also had experiences of writing to inform, at jobs where I assisted with crafting reports and publications. In those cases, I felt mechanical, like a cog in the machine of a business world where information ruled and the author of record was an organization.

In the conflict between creative expression and clear communication, finding a writing style can be a challenge.

The trick to clicking into your own brilliant style is to simplify, surrender, and trust:

Simplify – Rather than blowing the issue of style into a huge and debilitating impediment, pare it down to the essentials within your control: how you express yourself and the information you want to communicate. Notice that how your writing is received by others is not a part of this equation. That’s important. Something within is compelling you to express yourself. Dive in. Splash around in your own world. Feel and write.

Surrender – You are unique. No one in all the world, over all time, has ever or will ever be you. Embrace, accept, and surrender to this stark fact and put your attention on being as you as you can be. The more honest you can be in your writing (no matter what you’re writing), the more your unique brilliance and style will rise into view. Your role as a writer (and a human) is to pledge allegiance to your own voice, come what may. Even if the shape and clarity of your voice takes practice to discern. It’s already there, in you, as you, for you.

Trust – Your honest writing will connect deeply with people who need it. When you trust this, the goal of sharing your writing becomes finding the people who need your writing, not massaging your writing style so more people will like you or your writing. The people who need your writing will resonate with the honest energy you bring, which will ring something true and honest inside them, allowing them to connect more fully with themselves. Trust that when you share your writing, especially in public arenas where strangers read, you won’t know the extent of your effect on others. So you have to trust in positive forces outside your control.

Control what you can. Accept that you are one of a kind. Write as honestly as possible. Share and trust. 

After decades of mulling over the comment by my college teacher (“Beautiful story, though I don’t understand it”), I came to realize a crucial message of that experience: That teacher wasn’t my true audience.

Whenever I feel like my style is insufficient to be attractive enough, or when I feel like my style gets in the way of communicating what I want to say, I return to honesty. The surprise inside is that the pursuit of honesty above all else will result in the clearest communication signal to the people who need your writing the most.

In the end, in order to be found by those people, you’ll need to release your writing into the wild to encounter a life of its own. If you’ve dared to create from the place that is the most you—the only you there will ever be in the world, then you’re already familiar with courage.

Open your chest and let your words fly.

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Grace Kerina is a writing coach with more than twenty years of experience helping authors find their true voices. To receive the free PDF “50 Creative Writing Prompts for Intuitive Writers,” sign up for her mailing list here. She also writes novels as Alice Archer.