There’s a story about Freddie Mercury. Okay, there are lots of stories about him, but this one is relevant to my current post.

Mercury was born with four extra incisors. According to rock’n’roll lore, he believed those extra teeth contributed to his phenomenal vocal range. As such, even though dental surgery was common at the time, especially among celebrities, he refused to ever have his teeth “fixed.” His voice was his life, his unique talent that made Freddie Mercury Freddie Mercury, and he would not do anything to risk that.

And so he kept his too-big, crooked smile.

Writers should take this example to heart. There are basic rules for writing, how-tos that explain how to best and most clearly express ideas to your readership. But those are just the basic rules. Anyone can learn and follow them — even AI/plagiarism programs. Especially plagiarism programs. Toss in those basic rules and a few genre tropes, sit back, and voila, the plagiarism software will spit out a rote, by the numbers story.

There will be absolutely nothing unique about that story. Nothing personal, unusual, quirky, or human.

As writers, we endure plenty of complaints about our work; not just the genres and subject matter of our stories, but the style in which we write them. Too much dialogue. Not enough dialogue. Too many parenthetical phrases. Too few parenthetical phrases. Too many ellipses. Where are all the ellipses? There should be more ellipses! What’s with all the italics? You definitely should have used italics there, and there, too. And what’s with all the commas, semi-colons, colons, and em-dashes?

And so on and et cetera.

But you know what? All that dialogue, all those parenthetical phrases and ellipses and italics and em-dashes — well, those are your too-big, crooked smile. Those are your voice.

The unique style in which you craft a story marks it as your story. Not someone else’s story. Not the creation of plagiarism software. Yours.

So let the haters and the critics complain. Let them wind themselves up into a knot and shout until they are purple in the face. But don’t fix your smile. Sure, follow the basic rules to communicate clearly with your reader (although particularly skilled writers can get away with breaking those rules; James Joyce, anyone?). But beyond those rules, write the way you want. Use all the bolds and semi-colons and run-on sentences that you want.

Write in a way that reflects you.

Make your story personal, unusual, quirky, and human.

[Written by Rebecca Buchanan.]