Okay, so one of the biggest things that I’ve noticed in my quest to get writing advice from as many authors as I possibly can is that the advice tends to get repeated over time. And that makes sense. I’m getting writing advice from authors that are successful and of course they are going to have similar writing advice.

But a big one that I’ve always kind of found important and intriguing is the idea of finding your own voice. After years and years and years of telling stories, there aren’t many new stories. So how on earth is it possible that new books are coming out every day? And its so simple: because the story idea may be the same but the voice of the author is very different.

Every author has a different voice, and this voice comes from different places. My voice mostly comes from my personality. I tend to have kind of a wacky and all-over-the-place personality and you can see that in my writing. My characters thoughts sometimes get off topic or go on tangents because that’s exactly how I think, and that’s exactly how I write. My characters and stories are shaped by the experiences that I have, the beliefs and morals that I have and so on. I could be telling  story that is similar to something we’ve already seen before but it’ll be different (or so I hope) because of the voice that I give to my character and my story.

And I’ve been really strong in this, especially lately, because of the amount of writers I have brought in my life. I have writers all over the place and we’re all working towards similar goals. And sure, I could sit here and try to compete with them and try to be better than them but why bother? Its so pointless. If anything, these writers give me inspiration and they give me the urge to do better and write better. Because sure, there are always going to be writers that are better than you, always. But that doesn’t stop people from writing. I mean, look how many books and stories have come our way since Dante’s Inferno and that’s an absolute masterpiece. We tell different stories. We have different voices.

And this made me curious. Since I do know a lot of writers, I had the people with me. I had an idea. What if we all started with the same story idea, something simple, and we all wrote something short based off of that. I was interested to see what kind of stories we would all get.

So I messaged my writer friends and told them all about my idea. And they loved. Whew. Sometimes, only occasionally, I have some winning ideas. Apparently this was one of them.

So here was the premise I gave my girls:

“You are a seventeen year old girl, suddenly crash landed on a deserted island, as the result of a plane crash.”

I know, a little cliche and not very original but I wanted to give my girls something familiar. I’m sure we’ve all had some exposure to a situation like this in a book or TV show or movie. This is not something new. They didn’t have to be super professional, or edited, and they were meant to be fairly short, 1-pages long. This was meant to be a writing experiment, an exercise to see how differently we all write.

Well, I’ve got all the stories here for you. Are you ready to read them?

I enjoyed ALL of these, and I am so happy with all of them. They all have a different voice and they all come from different places. It was interesting to see what each writer came up with from such a simple topic.

So here you are guys: Enjoy!

Sara (me)

Kelly “Little Wolf”

Megan from iFandoms Collide 

Megan from The Nerdy Girlie

Gina 

Shaina from The Urge to Write

Jackie from Seeking Bazinga

Ruben

I hope you enjoyed them, and I REALLY hope that you took the time to read them. They are super short, and its pretty interesting and cool to see the different stories that came from the same topic.

Thanks to all the lovely writers who participated in this as well. YOU GUYS ROCK! And thanks for always going along with me and my crazy ideas :)

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I’m thinking of doing this ONE more time :) If you are interested and would like to participate, feel free to email me here, and we’ll get it started!