Escaping the tyranny of “someone else” 
Excuses, excuses. We can all come up with ones for not writing. The ones that I hear the most, and which make me want to scream, involve “someone else”. Mainly:
I can’t write this. Someone else knows more about the subject than I do!
Or:
Someone else can do a better job of writing this than me.
These excuses are paper thin. They’re just a way of avoiding a tough writing project, and avoiding any inevitable criticism. But those excuses should never hold you back. Here’s why.
No matter how much you know …
It’s a given that someone (or several someones) will know more about a topic than you do. That shouldn’t stop you from writing about it. In my case, there are people who know more about just about everything that I write than I do. Some of them are pretty vocal and nit-picky about it, too. That hasn’t slowed me down much.
An even better example comes from Joseph Needham. A biochemist by training, Needham learned Mandarin and eventually began work on the massive Science and Civilization in China. Needham didn’t have a background in history or Sinology, but he got around that. How?
Research, and lots of it. As I mentioned in a previous post, what you don’t know you learn by doing research and interviews.
No matter how good you are …
Some writers are just plain better than most others. Big deal. If you regularly sell your work, you’re good to tackle a tough project. Unless you’re a complete hack, you should be able to pound out a readable article or book. That work might not win an award, but who says it won’t find an audience?
While I consider myself a good writer, I realize that I’m not great. While in journalism school and working on one of the student papers, I knew my work wasn’t going to be regularly on the front page. But someone had to fill the pages in between front and back. I did just that, all the while trying to make my writing and reporting the best that they could be.
And ask yourself this: have those better writers covered this topic? If they have, who says you don’t have a new perspective on that topic? If they haven’t, why not? Could it be that they’re also being tyrannized but that someone else?
There’s no reason why that someone else can’t be you.
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There is nothing new under the sun, so the saying goes, so nothing we say is truly original and we keep writing about the same old things, like people falling in and out of love, and other people keep reading the stuff that gets written. Why we keep reading is because most of us are looking for those particular words that make something make sense to us.
A site I was on today was looking for quotes about the writing life so I gave them one of mine: ‘Writers don’t have lives. They have ongoing research.’ It’s a quote I’m quite proud of. It’s still not saying anything new but it is saying it in a new way. Someone will read that and being a writer will make sense to them where other things they have read did not. If that happens then my job is done.