Picture “Unique” by Mazyono from www.deviantart.com

The prompt for the month asks what makes me a unique writer. Hmm. Any answer I give could come off sounding flippant. I’m a unique person, of course. No one has my exact background. No one has read the same list of books. No one has had my experiences with family, job, travel, or children.

What makes me a unique writer is that my experiences provide areas of overlap with many people. If I say I was in the United States Air Force that gives me a common background with a lot of people who can say the same thing. We have that shared experience. The same is true with child birth, or hiking and backpacking, or with driving a car. Not everyone will have done those things but enough have that similar experience to know what I mean when I talk about them.

Having those unique experiences allows me to write about them and to use them to extrapolate the skills and feelings from them to experiences I haven’t had. I’ve never been shot but I have broken bones, been burned, gone through childbirth, so I know what pain feels like. I can describe pain and a character’s reaction to it because I’ve felt pain.

Then there are the technical skills, how I put my sentences together, what words I use, and the cadence of my prose. That’s called voice. As someone once told me and you’ve probably experienced for yourself, you can tell by reading a paragraph or two if a piece of work is by your favorite author. You can spot his or her voice in the writing. Prose by Robert Heinlein will sound very different than prose by James Patterson.

So back to the question, what makes me a unique writer? I suppose it’s the sum of my life and how I chose to use it to write my stories.

The Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour is sponsored by the website Forward Motion (http://www.fmwriters.com). The tour is you, the reader, travelling the world from author’s blog to author’s blog. There are all sorts of writers at all stages in their writing career, so there’s always something new and different to enjoy. If you want to get to know the nearly twenty other writers check out the rest of the tour at http://merrygoroundtour.blogspot.com!  Up next: Jean Schara!