Stop Writing Someone Else's Book

When writer Mandy Len Catron finished a book proposal she’d started in 2019, she thought the hard part was over. A publisher was interested. Then came the pushback: similar books already crowded the market. And then came the question that changed everything: Do you think this book needs to exist?

That’s when Catron realized something uncomfortable. The book didn’t. Not really. It had been“started by a person I used to be”—someone before the pandemic scrambled her life, before teaching consumed her hours, before two toddlers and a crisis pregnancy redefined what mattered. She’d been trying to write someone else’s book, chasing a premise that no longer belonged to her.

So she started over. This time, she wrote about the crisis pregnancy itself—her actual experience, the one that had been reshaping her every day. And something shifted.“It felt less like making sentences and more like letting them flood through me. It was as though the draft already existed.”The words weren’t forced. They were urgent. They were hers.

This is what Catron now tells her students: don’t aim to transmit a generic experience or idea. Transmit the feeling, the specific truth, the angle that only you can see. Write the story that needs to exist because you’re the only one who can write it,“in the words that belong only to you.”The market doesn’t need another competent take on a familiar topic. It needs your unrepeatable perspective on what it means to be human right now.

The hardest part of writing isn’t the craft—it’s the permission slip. Permission to abandon the idea that worked for someone else. Permission to follow the material that haunts you, even if it seems too personal or too recent or too raw. Permission to trust that the story flooding through you is the one the world actually needs to read.

What story have you started but abandoned because it didn’t match a version of yourself from years ago?