The art of Writing

I love writing, sadly though, I am not the type to do so easily. My brain goes a million miles an hour faster than my fingers can type and tends to wander away when it gets bored waiting. Worse yet I'm a perfectionist and if it doesn't come out as if it has already been edited by a team of anal retentive editors I'm not able to write it. My rough drafts in High school were simply written in pencil instead of ink.

But there is more to writing than just putting your thoughts on paper (or on a Kindle). You have to be able to get the thought across in a way people appreciate and comprehend. It has to be more than just an idea, you have to purvey an emotion they can relate with too.

Figuring out what good writing actually "is" can actually be quite easy, but most people don't read enough anymore to appreciate it. Sure, just like any art form it's subjective and open to interpretation, but there is a standard that most can agree on.

Here is an easy way to learn the difference between bad and good writing. Get a copy of 50 Shades of Gray. Read as much as you can and you'll see why most fan fiction never makes it into print (even the really good ones). The is no depth to the characters or writing, the story is weak and everyone walks away feeling worse after it's done. Sure, the subject matter catches people's interest but even then she makes it about as sexy as Donald Trump opening his robe and saying "does the Donald make you hot bitch?"

Now after suffering through that book, pick up A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. You won't get 20 pages in before you are floored by the mastery of the language employed by the author. It's hard not to go "Medieval person seeing technology" when you read it. What is this word magic this man uses? It must be the devil. It's really that much better than 50 Shades of Inaccurate. My friends, you just went from stale crackers to Filet Mignon, and it's the type that's wrapped in bacon too.

One of the tricks I've learned is that you can't just "say" what you want to convey. You have to add something to it to really get the point across. Here is an example, that is actually based on a funny post I read on Facebook. Have ever been so hungry that you ate an entire bag of chips and then poured the crumbs into your hand and shoved them into your mouth? Well, most people would simply write that they gobbled them down or something to that effect. Well a good writer would write something on the lines of "I that one split second when my lips touched my palm I realized that I was both the nervous but ravenous deer and at the same time I was the young girl cautiously extending her hand filled with food to win the trust of the docile animal"  

See the difference, it's subtle but it's there. It's all about the nuance my friends.