No magic bullets
Mar. 4th, 2005 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonI posted this to the OWW mail listing over a month ago, but someone expressed interest in it, so I decided to post it here as well.
When I was a very young writer—and even now when I engage in magical thinking—I thought there was this Big Secret that all the real writers knew and were keeping from the rest of us. Maybe a secret formula for concocting the perfect, killer hook; or a set of guidelines and formulae which, if applied to any piece of writing, could turn sophomoric dreck into polished and professional prose. (No offense meant to sophomores.) After much gazing into crystal balls trying to figure out what the Secret was, I finally decided maybe I should give up because I would never be smart or good enough to decipher the mystical ways of the writer.
I kept writing, though, because I had the need real bad, and discovered something. My writing was improving. I wasn't quite sure how or why, and it still wasn't great, but the more I did it, the more I figured things out. And I came to the conclusion that the only Big Secret about writing is the same dreary secret to losing weight: consume less fat and work out on a regular basis.
That's it. The calisthenics of writing. Just write. Try new stuff, as Hannah eloquently suggested. Fail gloriously, knowing that nobody has to see those glorious failures if you don't want them to. Reduce the fat content of your words (which is not the same as trying to turn lush prose into cult of brevity prose). Repeat as needed. And repeat and repeat and repeat.
Writing is the best writing teacher I have ever had.
When I was a very young writer—and even now when I engage in magical thinking—I thought there was this Big Secret that all the real writers knew and were keeping from the rest of us. Maybe a secret formula for concocting the perfect, killer hook; or a set of guidelines and formulae which, if applied to any piece of writing, could turn sophomoric dreck into polished and professional prose. (No offense meant to sophomores.) After much gazing into crystal balls trying to figure out what the Secret was, I finally decided maybe I should give up because I would never be smart or good enough to decipher the mystical ways of the writer.
I kept writing, though, because I had the need real bad, and discovered something. My writing was improving. I wasn't quite sure how or why, and it still wasn't great, but the more I did it, the more I figured things out. And I came to the conclusion that the only Big Secret about writing is the same dreary secret to losing weight: consume less fat and work out on a regular basis.
That's it. The calisthenics of writing. Just write. Try new stuff, as Hannah eloquently suggested. Fail gloriously, knowing that nobody has to see those glorious failures if you don't want them to. Reduce the fat content of your words (which is not the same as trying to turn lush prose into cult of brevity prose). Repeat as needed. And repeat and repeat and repeat.
Writing is the best writing teacher I have ever had.
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Date: 2005-03-04 12:19 pm (UTC)(And I'd put reviewing in second place. A distant second, but still significant.)
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Date: 2005-03-04 01:48 pm (UTC)Yeah--I really do believe the received wisdom that you learn as much or more by critting other people's stuff than by getting crits in return.
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Date: 2005-03-04 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 01:43 pm (UTC)Science can be learned without doing.
Not so for Art.
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Date: 2005-03-04 02:31 pm (UTC)I'd still love it if there was a Big Secret, though ;-)
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Date: 2005-03-04 03:10 pm (UTC)Sign me up, please. Until then... I'll keep hoping I'm not one of the.. you know.. not smart enough and not good enough ones. =D
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Date: 2005-03-04 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 03:48 pm (UTC)Me, too! Seems like if we could learn the right incantation, we could make somebody tell us.