Yes, Everybody Does Have a Story

Everybody does indeed have a story. You are an individual with your own perception of everything, you have an imagination and a history, something in all that has to be worth retelling. I believe everybody has a novel in them. Does everybody have the skills to to find and tell that story? Definitely not. Writing is a craft, like woodwork. If you want to make a table you have to hold to a certain definition of what a table is. Sure, you can mess with the form, but for it to be called a table it still has to meet with the basic definition, so the woodworker must have an idea of how to build that basic form first. He or she has to know the purpose it is supposed to serve and what it should look like, then they can decide to put their own twist on it if they want. 

The easy way to get that basic form is to imitate somebody else, just take your story, fiction or non-fiction, and slap it on somebody else’s template. That’s the easy way, though, and people who like to do things the easy way tend not to be very diligent workmen. Lazy writers tend to be lazy readers as well, so they choose the easiest templates to steal, and  they miss the things that are worth stealing. You wind up with sloppy writers stealing from other sloppy writers till you wind up with a bunch of books that are pretty much the same as each other. They do poor work of making somebody else’s work their own so the writing lacks consistency, the fact that they did not come up with the whole thing on their own shows through. 

The hard way is to build the thing yourself, from the bottom up. Imitate no one. What will happen at this point is that all the people who have gotten used to writers imitating one people (usually Stephen King or John Grisham) will feel alienated. It will be like going directly from Dr Seuss to James Joyce, and no one will get what you are trying to say but for an elite few, a small audience, and you will have to work like hell to find them. They will be made up of the bitter, the alienated, the lonely and the obsessive and the nerdy. Your audience will remain small. By the way, I am not dissing King or Grisham, they clearly know what they are doing. 

Even bad writers, the ones who spend their time “looking for inspiration”, and in writers workshops and networking, and who spend way more time in Internet forums than they do writing stuff to sell, even they have stories. The problem is that they don’t know how to find them. They spend so much time trying to find a story that will get them all the attention and money they want that they have lost sight of the thing that keeps you reading, that kept Scheherezade alive for her 1001 nights, and kept soap operas on for decades. 

Back to my table/woodwork analogy: if you try to build a table like the one in the store next door, then you have two similar tables. Odds are yours won’t be as good as the first guy’s since he thought of it first. Somebody will come along and do the same thing with your work. It is like a photocopy of a photocopy, all of it degrading through time, till people lose sight of what was good about tables in the first place and end up settling for table-like objects.