The Good, the Great, and the Unpublished

There's something both inspiring and terrifying about other (published) writers. I personally want to be Suzanne Collins and/or Alison Goodman when I grow up. Reading their work just does something to me. It motivates me to write to the point that I can barely stand not to. It's like I see them flying in the sky above me, and I want to flap my wings and join them way up there. But they are both also so great that I freeze up when I think, how could I ever be as good as they are? Then it's a decision between folding my wings back up, and at least flapping them tentatively. I choose to at least try.

So when I read their work, I analyze it (as all we readers/writers are prone to do). How did the writer get me to like that character so much? Why are my feelings mixed up about this one? Why was I surprised so easily by that twist, when looking back I can see that I should have known all along? And... what does this stylistic choice say about this writer?

At first, I subconsciously assumed that these writers like Stephen King, James Patterson, Terry Brooks, Nora Roberts, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and James Dashner must exude something like godhood from their personalities. Their writing was just too good for them to be otherwise. But now I've met a few writers (actually several, but I haven't read every one's work). So far, I've read the works of Jodi Thomas, Deborah Elliott-Upton, and Jennifer Archer. I find it incredibly difficult to picture these living, breathing, normal people in connotation with these words on these pages. What is in their minds that causes them to create this story, give these characters their particular personalities, add that certain twist?

I'm currently having the greatest difficulty with Through Her Eyes, Jennifer Archer's latest Young Adult novel. As I read, I try to find her fingerprints in the words. I've seen very few. First is her dialogue: it actually tends to remind me a little bit of the way she speaks, or maybe the way she has related stories to me. The only other thing is one I wouldn't notice except that she's told me about it: the style of putting a coma between two clauses with action verbs that are normally joined with 'and'. For example, the sentence: I sit next to her, cross my arms. (Apparently this gets on her editor's nerves a little bit, but don't tell her I said anything.) Other than that those familiar things, I could be reading any author in the world.

These probing questions carry over into my own writing as well. When I'm rereading my work, I think, do I speak like that? Is this thought the character's, or simply one I would have in this situation? How did something like this come out of my mind?

If, let's say, I somehow got amnesia, and someone handed me my own work to read, I would think it had been written by any other author in the world.

So are writers generic? I've read in several articles on writing that authors take the opportunity to become someone else when they write. 'I just lose myself in writing' isn't just some analogy. When I come up for air after a long writing binge, I look around and think, how did I get here again? Oh, that's right. Our identity is narrowed down to a picture on the back of the dust jacket and a quick blurb about location plus number of pets. When someone reads our work, we could be anyone, and they would never know that after we close the laptop, we drive off to work at the Post Office, or in a cubicle, or to sell other writers' books.

And yet... what sets those great writers apart from the rest of us? Obviously, they are different from those of us on the bottom of the ladder because they've actually been published. They're different from the next rung up because they have more than one or two books on the shelves. But then there are some who have written two or three books, and they greatly outwrite some who take up two shelves.

So what separates the good... from the great?