Hey Sam!
I am not a good writer. To produce something half decent, I have to spend a lot of time in front of the computer, clacking away at the keyboard, endlessly copying and pasting, reading and rereading, deleting and revising.
Good writing is hard to produce. It requires you to focus your thoughts and concentrate on the details to ensure that every word is in its proper place. It’s a process of putting together the tiles of a jigsaw puzzle, fitting them by trial and error, by experience or intuition, until each of the oddly shaped pieces form a coherent whole. It’s a good feeling when you’ve solved a jigsaw puzzle, oui? I’d like to think it’s the same feeling I get when it comes to writing.
You can read as many books on writing as you want but it’s not guaranteed to help. These books will give you advice upon advice upon advice on how to get ideas, mold and shape characters, develop your climax and denouement, hold your audience in suspense and anticipation, etc. But I think, in the end, all those advice can be distilled into three and it took me almost a quarter of a century to realize that I’ve know them all along—I’ve read them in high school.
The three things I’m talking about was so succintly given by a 16th century philosopher and essayist named Francis Bacon that I failed to realize its meaning until now. In Bacon’s one paragraph essay titled Of Studies, he wrote:
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
Three phrases, three pieces of advice. I’ll stretch the meaning of “conference” a bit and say that it has something to do with criticizing and revising your work, a conference with your inner voice. This is a post on writing, after all, and I take Bacon’s statement above as advice to would-be writers. So, the three advice presented a la Powerpoint bullets:
- Read a lot.
- Write a lot.
- Edit a lot.
I find it hard to start writing because I’m always at a lost for ideas. Even when I know what to write about (a job application, a short story, a letter to a colleague), I still have no clue where to start. That magical first sentence simply won’t appear.
Where do ideas come from? Or inspirations for that matter? Perhaps they come to you in a daydream. Perhaps while you’re on a stroll at the park or a hike to the hill. Or while you’re upside-down 100 ft in the air on a roller-coaster and your stomach is churning and you’re developing tunnel vision as you desperately try to catch your breath. Some people get their ideas these ways and you’re lucky if you’re like them. But I think it’s a hit-or-miss strategy.
I think a better way to get ideas is to read. A lot. Read newspapers. Read billboards and signs and postings. Read people, i.e., observe. Read the classics. Read Shakespeare1. Read Dr. Seuss. Read biographies2. Anything. But as you read, always be on the lookout and keep a ready mind. Entertain yourself by being an active reader. Apply the 5W and 1H used by news reporters—who, what, when, where, why, and how. And I’ll add another W to the list. What if? I think this is more important than the 5W and 1H because asking “What if?” allows you to create your own vision of the story. Asking What if is a practice in creativity.3
Reading does not only help you generate ideas. It also helps improve your writing, probably similar to a monkey-see-monkey-do method. When you closely read a book and pay careful attention to the writing, you are actually activating and honing your super-spidey sense that detects villanous authors. Soon your supersense will recognize bad works almost instantaneously and learn to avoid them. By the time you know it, you’re applying the same tingly sensation to your work. But there’s a downside: you become a perfectionist. To you, nothing you write will ever be great. The best you could hope for is “good enough.” That’s OK, as long as it is your supersense that says it’s good enough.
You should write a lot to develop your ideas and practice your skills. Think of it this way: you put a kernel of corn on the ground hoping it will grow into a large plant and bear fruits. You don’t leave it alone after burying it in the soil. You need to care for it, water it, fertilize it, trim the weeds, protect it from wild animals. Same thing with your idea. Feed it with interesting characters—round, flat, three-dimensional. Fertilize it with exciting scenes. Water it with conflicts. Protect it from redundancy and cliche. Ask questions like “What if?” and then imagine the answers. What if machines can think for themselves? What if humans need to escape an impending nuclear war? What if humans colonize another planet? Remember when we read Ray Bradbury’s The Naming of Names?
The most important advice is #3. Edit, edit, edit. It is the mantra that every writer says to themself before going sleep at night and after waking up in the morning. It is also the hardest of the three because it requires you to put on your critic hat and butcher your work. At this stage, you become schizophrenic of sorts. You develop an internal conflict, a split personality, because your super-spidey sense tells you the work is tethering on mediocrity while the author in you says the work is brilliant.
There is an advice #0, but really a prerequisite, an assumption. It is assumed that you have a good working knowledge of grammar, syntax, usage, and style. Not guru level, but enough to get by. Stephen King, in his book On Writing, referred to this as your toolbox and suggested some good points. John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction offers a better advice: Pick a proper book on rhetoric, learn the fundamentals for two weeks, and be done with it. You are now at that point where you know enough that you should be able to learn the rest on your own.
Once you’ve learned the fundamentals, everything else is icing on the cake. And like in a cake, it’s the icing that makes it taste good. Beware, though. Eating too much icing will most certainly result in a heart attack.
But icing can be fun. Take punctuation for example. The title of this entry is “Edit, edit, edit.” I chose the comma to emphasize the repetitiveness4 of the process. If I had written it as “Edit! Edit! Edit!,” the effect is not the same. It’s exclamatory, seeming to suggest that editing is an exciting activity. It is not. I could have changed the tone from exclamatory to doubtful by saying “Edit. Edit! Edit?”
Hopefully, you learned something from this post, things that you can use when it’s time to write that college application essay. Yes, I know, it’s still a few years in the future. But you can start sharpening your skills now—the whole point of this blog, yeah?
Now will you please give me your alternate ending to August Heat?
, you’ll find that 163 is the sum of the letters in the phrase “is a prime number”.
. Coolness!
Hey Sam! ~ Hey Dad! 