Writing is one of those things you can either do or not. The skills can be taught, but it takes years of practice to get the right voice down, capture a level of subtlety, and remain able to inform as well as entertain without selling yourself short. Having a copywriter’s touch is also not a bad thing, either, as it will teach you to be both efficient and elegant.
Me? Well, I’ve always sought truth. Truth is a balance between fact and fiction, reality and belief, information and entertainment, and a host of other factors. All factors converge in the long run, though and you are left with you as you are with no filters, bows, ribbons, or fanfare. Your work, on the other hand, is sliced, cut, embellished, trimmed, concatenated, and generally edited. Such is the nature of the machine.
Don’t fall in love with words or phrases or novels or articles. Fall in love with the process. Learn to court the pen and paper or the keyboard and word processor. Romance the research. Give the pitch a tongue bath. Dry hump the… you get the idea. You see most of the ideas have really already come about. If you study Joseph Campbell and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, you see it’s all been done already. Many, many times with many different names, dates, and phrases. I think this is always frustrating for the new writer as they will fight you and insist that their details supersede your theories and you are oh so wrong. Then, as they edit and correct their work, they realize you were right. Damn. They were right.
I know I did. I fought it tooth and nail (or some other cliche). As I write this, I’m staring at my worn out copy I got at Bookmans many years ago. I have others I love to read. I’ve saved the cat more times than I can count and I can’t go anywhere without my Strunk and White.
Those books don’t make me a better writer, though. I do. I make me a better writer. I’ve learned to at least write as a writer and read as an editor. It aggravates my wife who reads purely for fun. She doesn’t write. She doesn’t understand why its so frustrating until she tries to do it. Then she feels like she writes like a child and she’s a much better writer than she knows.
