12 Week Year for Writers

Why the World Needs Your Voice

• Trevor Thrall • Episode 37

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Ever feel like your topic is taken, your niche is crowded, and your draft adds nothing new? Let’s flip that script. We walk through five clear reasons your words matter now—starting with a reframing that changes everything: writing is a conversation, not a competition. When you see books and essays as flavors, not trophies, the goal shifts from being the only voice to bringing your unique taste to the table. That shift opens the door to momentum, courage, and better work.

We dig into how individual experience and style shape meaning for different readers. Crowded genres signal demand, not futility. Some people will learn from you because of your cadence, stories, and lens—and not from the biggest names in the field. We also talk about the cultural role of writers as torchbearers who keep ideas alive by renewing them for the present. Retellings, reframings, and updates aren’t duplicates; they are bridges that carry wisdom forward.

Then we get tactical. You’ll hear a practical system for starting small and iterating with less fear: test chapters, micro-shares, talks, proposals, and structured feedback loops. We cover “fail early, fail often” as a learning engine, plus the mindset tools that sustain you—resilience for the tough comments and a growth mindset that treats every draft as a step toward a clearer voice. By the end, you’ll have both the why and the how to publish with purpose, find your readers, and keep going when the noise gets loud.

If this resonates, follow the show, leave a quick review to help other writers find it, and share this episode with a friend who needs a nudge to hit publish.

We're excited to announce the launch of our new website: 12weekyearforwriters.com

To celebrate, you can join the 12 Week Year Writers membership for 50% off the first three months.

ABOUT TREVOR THRALL & THE 12 WEEK YEAR FOR WRITERS

My team and I help writers get their writing done. If you're stuck, it's not a knowledge problem. It's not a skill issue. And it's not a motivation or willpower thing. You know what you need to do and how to do it. The problem is consistent execution: getting the writing done week in and week out.

With the 12 Week Year for Writers system, you'll create a routine that helps you write more, and more happily, than ever before.

Thanks for listening!

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the 12 Week Year for Writers Podcast. I'm Trevor Thrall, author of the 12 Week Year for Writers. If you enjoyed today's episode, please submit a review wherever you get your podcasts. And for updates on the pod and all the resources you need to get your writing done, check us out at 12weekearforwriters.com. Are you feeling stuck because you're not sure the world needs to hear what you have to say? I talk to writers all the time who are feeling this way. Young writers who've never published something and are worried that what they write won't sell. People writing memoirs who are just not sure the world wants to hear their life story. Nonfiction and academic writers worried that other people know more than they do, so why do I get to write a book? Today we're going to talk about why the world needs to hear your voice. But she was worried that she was feeling stuck. She couldn't feel comfortable writing a book on the subject she had in mind because she worried that there are just so many other people who are more expert than she on the topic. So why, you know, why is anyone anyone gonna read what I have to say? Why does it matter what I say? And that really sparked my thinking because you know, I was my thought is geez, if she can feel this way, man, think how bad it is for the rest of us. Um and and it's just it's a problem that writers of all genres face, right? The need to find the confidence that sharing your voice is a worthy thing to do. So, you know, it's just too often that we're not sure the world needs our writing. You know, we're not, is it new enough? Is it interesting enough? Is it well written enough? You know, what makes me so special? The world has a lot of people clamoring for attention already. It's hard to feel authorized to share your voice with the world. You know, I'm certainly not arrogant enough to imagine the world really needs to hear me. Um, lots of other people writing about the things I talk about. So if I'm not the smartest or the most authoritative source out there, why should I bother? And I think this kind of fear and and anxiety uh affects so many people that I wanted to talk about it today. Because I think there are so many reasons why the world needs to hear your voice right now, uh, that I want to share them. And and I'm I'll try to throw in some stories here because believe me, this is a journey, not something I was born with myself. But uh so let's let's dig in, right? So I think I'm gonna give you five reasons why it's important for you to share your voice, and uh and I'm gonna try to throw in a few sort of strategies uh along the way. So the first argument, and and I'm gonna apologize in advance, um, I'm gonna use a very extended, possibly lame ice cream metaphor as we go, because I don't know why it just seemed like a good idea. So the first uh argument I have for you is that writing should be seen of all kinds, right? Writing of all kinds is a conversation, not a competition. Um there is no answer to the question, what is the best flavor of ice cream? Now, I'm sure you've had this conversation, but it's also obvious there's no correct answer, right? Just because chocolate is an incredible flavor doesn't mean we don't benefit from having other flavors, right? Same thing for writing. Just because people have written wonderful books in your field or in your genre, your niche, doesn't mean we don't need more books. Typically, when people like a certain uh niche, they want to read as much as possible. And then if they want more flavors, they don't want just chocolate, they want chocolate and strawberry and vanilla and all that sort of stuff, right? Just like your favorite ice cream parlor, conversations are at their best when we have many voices, many flavors sharing different perspectives and unique stories. There's never going to be an end to our need for conversation. There will never be a time at which you can say, This niche is full, no more books ever need to be written. That will never happen. We never have to stop having conversations about how to be good people, the meaning of the universe, how to run a government, uh, how to fall in love, right? None of this stuff can ever be over. So writing is a conversation, not a competition. And so I think, you know, from a sort of a policy implication for us here, right? If you're thinking about how to move forward because you're worried about the competition part, is to focus on your own input. Don't worry about what other people are saying. Don't read what other people are doing right now. If that freaks you out because it's so good or feels whatever, all right, don't read it. Focus on your own stuff. Okay. Second reason uh is that uh, and these things build, these build on each other. Uh, the second reason is that every voice adds a unique flavor to the conversation, right? So, right, sticking with our ice cream metaphor here, the only person who can create your unique flavor of ice cream is you. No matter how brilliant some other writer might be, they can only write in their own style, from their own experiences, with their own particular voice, right, and and way of thinking about the world. Uh, so if you don't share your voice, the conversation by definition will be the lesser for it, right? And and and bring it back to ice cream, right? I I was a huge Baskin Robbins fan as a kid. I I'm old, so I grew up before there was tons of other uh major ice cream brands. Um, and I shudder to think what it would have been like if Baskin Robbins had thought chocolate was so good, they didn't need to invent my favorite flavor, Jamoko Almond Fudge. Don't don't rob the world of your flavor, right? Bring your flavor to the party. Right? Um, and the strategy or the implication of that piece of advice to me is to focus on being yourself. A lot of us, when we're new writers, think that the way we need to operate is to copy people who we think are experts or think are accomplished or whatever. And there is some uh valid validity to copying some of the things that people who are good at what we want to do are doing, right? So if you think this writer is a great person and it turns out they write every morning, I'm not saying don't write every morning because you think it's part of their way of you know being successful. Um, but trying to write sentences that sound like Ernest Hemingway because you think Ernest Hemingway is a great writer, that may or may not be for you, right? Uh, I think it's actually an excellent um thing to do is to try to write in other people's voices, but the main reason to do that is to figure out what doesn't fit about doing that so you can find your voice, the way it works for you. So I my feeling is that what you want to do is figure out what it is about you that's unique that you're bringing. That's what the world needs, right? So every voice adds a unique flavor to the conversation. You're the only one who can bring your flavor. All right, third, third uh reason um is that the world needs many teachers. And um if we were using our ice cream metaphor here, uh people all have different favorite different flavors, right? Um so yes, there are some writers out there with huge audiences, no matter what genre you look at, there are a few people who dominate conversation, of course. And it can be incredibly intimidating to write in that genre or niche when you see that. You know, why would anyone listen to you? Um the problem is this can really have a chilling effect on those of us who, you know, uh pay too much attention to how famous those people are. And I'll tell you a quick story here. When I was in graduate school, and as a reminder, I I was got a PhD in political science. Um, and when I was in graduate school, my fellow students and I, as we were getting close to picking dissertation topics, um, or you know, as we were just in the early stages of working on our dissertations, we would absolutely panic if we saw that someone had written a new book or even a journal article about that topic. Um, because we assumed that as soon as someone wrote one thing about our topic, it meant that the world would have no interest, no need for our lowly, you know, scholastic efforts. And so a lot of my friends abandoned topics they liked because they saw competition, which I warned you about already, right? Uh, but it turns out that running from those things is is backwards, right? Um, for a couple of reasons. First of all, the more popular the field or genre is, um, the more important it is for there to be many teachers, right? It and so it's it's funny because um your instinct says that's crowded, it's competitive, I should stay away. But the reality is what it means is there's a huge demand for information and teaching stories in that area. Looking at you, romance world, looking at you, productivity world, looking at you health, you know. There are just a lot of areas where there is a ton coming out. And the reason is because people need different flavors of teaching. They are there are a ton of people interested, and no one person can speak to all of those people effectively, right? So just but like people have different ice cream flavors, people also have different favorites when it comes to entertainment and learning. And you know, as a longtime teacher myself, I can absolutely tell you that you cannot help everyone. As much as you would like to, you cannot. Some people will learn well from you, some people will not. Some people you will just rub the wrong way for reasons you cannot fathom. You just can't reach them. Someone else has to help them, right? That someone else could be you, right? No matter how many people love Stephen King, there are more people who don't love him. No matter how many people love the seven habits of highly effective people, there are even more people who don't find it useful at all, and so on and so on. Just because Baskin Robbins makes a ton of great flavors doesn't mean we don't need Hagendas, doesn't mean we don't need Ben and Jerry's, and so on. Right? And and I cannot, I just cannot emphasize enough how important this is, because it can be discouraging to see Tony Robbins or Nora Roberts or whoever it is, and it looks like people only read this person, but that is absolutely not true, right? Will your audience be smaller than their audience? Of course it will. But is that a problem? No, it's not a problem, right? The the trick is to find your people. Find your students, find your readers, find the people who like the way you talk. And the only way you can find and gather those people together is by putting your stuff out there. You're not giving your people a chance to find each other if you don't call them together. You need to put the bait in the water so that the people who think and you know think like you or want to be entertained by you or want to learn from you, they need to be able to find each other and find you. So if you don't share, they're not going to be learning at their best. They're not gonna be entertained at their best. Um, and you know, that's that's just just huge. And and it's funny because a lot of times in the writing publishing sort of world, we focus on how competitive it is, and that's true at one level. There's a lot of a lot of books coming out. Um, and yet I also think simultaneously there aren't enough books coming out because there are still tons of people looking for answers, and there's only so many books, man. Even if you want to take as crowded a niche as you want to find, the number of books is still just not that many, right? And there's still uh plenty of ways to write um new approaches to any of those things, whether it's stories, uh fiction, or non-fiction. There's still tons of different ways. I am constantly amazed at the different niche areas of fiction. I read a lot in my spare time, and um I'm a dark academic. Like, what is that? I never heard of this read before a couple weeks ago, and I'm reading an article in the New York Times about this niche of fantasy that I never knew existed before. And it's amazing. I mean, it it will never stop uh being true that we need um different flavors for people. Okay. Fourth argument is that writing must constantly be made new. And to borrow the ice cream metaphor, you know, like a bowl of ice cream, writing doesn't last forever. It melts. Um, you know, outside of a few religious texts, I guess, and a few classics, um, very little writing survives more than a few years past its publication. Uh, and in fact, even the things that do last, it's only because people write other things, promoting them and explaining them, right? And that might sound depressing, but I look at it the other way around, right? I look at it as saying that writers have a sacred duty because it's writers who translate and transmit and carry the ancient stories and eternal truths and wisdoms from the past to the present. Writers carry, it's like a torch, right? The torch of truth, the torch of civilization. If you think about civilization, it's it's nothing more than a bunch of stories and beliefs about understandings about who we are, where we've been, where we're going, what's the point of life, right? Without writers to renew and refresh our understanding of our world, our civilization could not exist as we know it, right? Like even the Bible, even the Quran, even the Torah, whatever classics you want to point at, you need new teachers to explain them to the modern public, or they will never be able to pick up that classic and make sense of it. Right? So, writers have one of the most important jobs in the world. And I don't care if you're talking about fiction or nonfiction, right? The most ancient wisdoms are stories, and those stories constantly need retelling. And so, yes, brilliant writers have come before you, but their work can't last forever. We we need always to remake and rethink and re-address the old issues and the old wisdoms to meet new circumstances, to you know, put it in new language and so on. So think of yourself as a torchbearer, right? You're part of the unbroken line of torch bearers passing the light from generation to generation. Don't let the ice cream melt. And, you know, I think it's just from a sort of an apology implication here, right? I mean, if you think about maybe think about what you're writing and try to place it in this eternal sort of torch line, right? Where where does your story fit? What was the earliest version of the story you're telling? Is it, you know, Oedipus? Is it a story in the Bible? Is it like what where where's the first place someone told this story that you can find? And you know, where was the next one? And where are some of the other ones? And what were some of the more recent ones? And then where do you fit in this, right? Where are you taking this new truth? What are you, what sort of light are you shedding on this eternal truth uh or or struggle uh today? Um, you know, just from a real simple standpoint, like if even if you think about sort of modern classics almost, I guess you'd say like one of my favorite books in the last 15, whatever how many years it's been was Wicked. Um, and I read the book well before the um the incredible musical uh was made, and so there wasn't a lot of buzz about it. I don't know how I discovered it, I think at the library, just you know, wandering around. Um, and I was just blown away by Wicked, you know, a retelling of the Wizard of Oz. And I'm thinking to myself, who even thought we needed a retelling of the Wizard of Oz? But I guess we did. We sure did. I mean, think about how amazing Wicked has been. And it energized the classic, it retold some of the eternal truths, it gave some new spins, of course. That's what we do, right? But the Wizard of Oz, as amazing as a classic as that was, it still needed to be made new. So if that's true, then let's all bets are off. All writing must be constantly made new. So think of yourself not as having to invent things whole cloth, but you are remaking what must be remade. Okay. Fifth reason that you need to write and share your voice is that writing helps you find your voice. Um, you get better the more ice cream you make, right? So if you're an aspiring writer, newer writer in your genre, for whatever reason, the very act of writing things and sharing it with the world is the best way to figure out exactly what you want to say and to get better at it, right? Because the more you write, the stronger and clearer your voice will be, the better able you will be to pass the torch down from past to present and future. Um, the first things you write, not gonna be your best. And that's okay. That's not a problem, that's the process. Just remember, you can't start great, but you have to start to be great, right? Um, if we all waited until we felt confident, the shelves would be empty, right? There would be no delicious ice cream for dessert. If you had to be good at making it before you made it the first time, how would you do it? Right? You couldn't. You just couldn't. So I I think even if you don't buy any of my other arguments, um, you should buy this one, which is that you have to write to get good at writing and to find the voice that you truly do want to share. And and when I was talking before about, you know, if you feel like it gives you some comfort to copy or to try to write in the voice of those you respect, that's perfectly a good way to get started. My guarantee is that you're gonna find that some of those ways work better than others, and that your voice is going to be an evolution or some kind of spin-off of all those different voices. None of them is gonna be quite right. Even if you love listening to them, it's probably just not the way you think and write. So you you gotta, and the funny thing is, is it takes some time to write enough that you kind of process all those ghosts and cobwebs that are in your head or other examples, other voices that are in your head. If you've spent most of your life consuming, you've got a lot of stuff and chaff in your brain that needs to come out the keyboard before your true voice is what's left. And so it takes some words, you need some word count to get there. So those are my five, my five big reasons why I think you need to share your voice with the world now. Um, but you still may you may agree with me here, and then you still may say, well, okay, I buy it, but it's still hard. Like, I don't know how to get started doing that. And excellent, that's fair. So let me give you a few, a few sort of real tactical suggestions for getting going if you're feeling stuck and you're feeling a little nervous about it, right? The first big sort of I think strategy is to, it's kind of a an umbrella strategy for all the different things I'm talking about now, is to take baby steps, right? To break things down and take small steps so that you're never doing anything too scary and that you get a chance to to iterate, a chance to learn before you take another step. So, for example, um, you want to write a book. That's a big thing to ask yourself to do if you're nervous about how the book's gonna be received, and and so on and so forth. So, what are some baby steps along the way to publishing an entire book? Well, share a chapter, give a talk about it, uh, have a writing group where you workshop it, um, share three chapters, right? Uh you get the idea. There are steps you can take along the way to give yourself comfort that sharing is not going to kill you, that people are enjoying what you're sharing, uh, and you know, all that sort of stuff, right? Uh I'm a big believer in the phrase fail early and fail often. And I don't mean that in a scary way, like I think we normally think of the word failure as something that is morally bad. You shouldn't do it, you should try not to do it. My take is the other way around. I think we should attempt to fail early and fail often, because when we fail is when we learn how to do things better. And so if you want to write a good book, uh, the best way to do it is to write a bunch of books, frankly, right? Um, but in the case of writing a book, right, you want to write the idea for the book. You would like a proposal, write a proposal for the book five or six times, right? One of my PhD students who is now a professor doing a having a great career, uh, very productive writer himself, um, he he followed the fail early and fail often to a T when he was writing his dissertation proposal. And this is typically for, you know, one of my students would write something five pages long, ten pages long maximum, just to say, hey, here's what the study would be, here's what the research question would be, this is what I think I would do for my methods and and so on. Um, and the idea is that you know you have to have a proposal get accepted by your committee before they they let you go write the thing. And so he wrote one and I gave him feedback, and he wrote another and I gave him some feedback, and he wrote another one. He wrote nine proposals, and he did it over a period of, I don't know, maybe six or eight months. Um, but they weren't all on the same topic either. He he would get a couple in and go, okay, I'm not liking the feedback I'm getting. I'm not, I'm not in love with that. Try again, try again, try again. When he got the approval on the ninth one, I said, you know what? That one is the best one yet. He was like, I am ready. Now I'm ready to write that book. Because he felt super confident. Because all the failure proposals, right? They're not failures, they're iterations. They're just betas. We're just getting them out there to test. How's that feel? How's that feel? How's that feel? And every time he got closer and closer to something that really was going to work for him. The same can be true no matter what kind of writing you do. Chapter one, the idea, whatever it might be, right? The framing of a novel, whatever it is, right? You can iterate, share, iterate, share, iterate, share, right? And improve, improve, improve until you're feeling really comfortable. The more you do this, the more confident you can be in taking the next step. Okay, I'm really confident about my proposal. Now I can go do the data collection. I'm really feeling confident about this world I've built, or this character I've built, or this plot I've built. Now I'm gonna write chapter one, right? And then share chapter one. How do people like it? They don't like it, write it again, right? Um, you don't have to let the book go until you're comfortable with it. So taking baby steps, using the fail early, fail often kind of beta testing kind of mindset. Um and I think um a couple of mindset things are probably important here, too, right? One is um is, and these are both kind of elements of the of the overall writer's mindset that we talk about in the 12-week year. And the first piece is resilience, uh, because it is certainly true that when you share, you're gonna get feedback, some of which you don't like. And it's gonna hurt sometimes. Um, when I worked at a think tank back while I was a professor, I wrote commentary pieces a lot, a lot of them. And um despite I'm a policy person, I'm not a partisan person, so I I was not writing pro-partisan things, uh, just mostly criticizing U.S. foreign policy. Um, equal opportunity critic, criticize everyone. Um, but uh I I would get I would get criticized so bad from right and from left, and just oh, name calling, terrible, terrible stuff. And for a while it was I could, you know, I was an academic before that. I had never no one who wasn't a person with a PhD had ever commented about my work before, and so it was usually couched in academic ease, and it was usually fairly mild, you know. Oh, you could have more data on that uh point, you know, like whatever, okay, fine. But you know, now you have people calling you a maxi zoom cheese weenie or a traitor to the country, or you know, all sorts of frankly, just really horrible things. And and I was like, what the heck? And I it scared me. Like I was not sure I wanted to keep doing it because I'm like, well, you know, if that's gonna happen. But one of the things that will help, I think, with resilience for you is if you remember this, that the the point I made about sharing your voice is that the every voice adds something unique to the conversation, and the world needs many teachers, right? That you cannot please all the people all the time, no matter what kind of stuff you write. And even the most famous, accomplished writers have their haters. And in fact, in many genres, if you don't have haters, you're not doing your job, right? You and and especially if you're a nonfiction writer of some sort, I include academics here, typically, in many fields. If you don't have something that you're arguing against, it's hard to it's hard to get attention. And so, you know, like New York City, New York City is both people's favorite city on the planet and least favorite city on the planet. This is just what's gonna happen when you write stuff that's interesting. It's gonna provoke, it's gonna polarize. If you write sexy fiction, people who like sexy fiction are gonna dig it, and prudes are gonna say, ooh, that's gross and nasty, and that person's book should be banned from the library. That's not a problem. It's the reality of the world, but you do need to generate that resilience, that muscle needs to grow so that you're okay that your work is not loved by everyone. You're trying to find your people and you're trying to understand that it's not for everyone. And that can be hard to do. That's a growth process for all of us, for sure. So I encourage you to embrace that sense of uh resilience and that understanding that you are not everyone's favorite teacher or storyteller. Um, and then the the last piece of advice I'll give is just a quick plug for the growth mindset. Because none of us starts as the writer that we want eventually to be. And we start off our writing journeys uncertain about our voice, uncertain about our role in the conversation, whatever conversation we're joining. Sometimes we're not even sure what conversation we're joining, right? We're not sure about a lot of those things, and we're not sure if we can contribute or how. Those are all things that you have to maintain confidence that you will figure out as you go. As you write, you will find your voice. As you contribute, you will figure out what part, what role you play in the conversation. You will figure out where you can provide most value, you will find your people, you will get better at speaking to them, you'll get better at ignoring the people that uh you don't need to listen to. But remember, none of the things that you're feeling today are things you're stuck with. You can grow through practice and strategic thinking and support and all of those things and become the writer. With a voice that you're proud of. All right. I hope this has been helpful. I hope you are sharing your voice with the world. Shoot me an email if you're having questions or concerns about sharing your voice with the world that I haven't addressed. I'll be happy to talk with you about it. But until then, happy writing.