The Actuality About The Writing Life
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- October 7th, 2008 |
- Comments
When you are a writer, you cannot abstracted your writing from your life. Writers cannot not compose, so writing for you is like breathing. It is so natural you don’t even entertain it. I believe it’s a disgrace that so many writers affect their writing as anything from “primary time” to the last abstraction on their to-do list. Writing is life. And so the principles of life, or the actuality about life, are also the principles of, or the actuality about, the writing life.
I recently re-read a favorite sacred book, and in it I found a quote from the author’s high school drama educator. This drama educator must have been a mentor because he always taught his drama students the following:
The Actuality About Life
1. Leave your personal problems at the arrange door.
2. Affect the material with honesty, dignity and without embellishment.
3. Surface fully no matter how many people are in the audience.
I was short smitten with a simple cerebration: The Actuality About Life is exactly the same as The Actuality About The Writing Life, and so many of us forget these simple truths, as often in our everyday lives as we do in our writing lives.
So as a reminder, for all the writers out thither, here is my variant of The Actuality About (The Writing) Life
1. Leave your personal problems at the arrange door.
When you are writing, IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU! What? Not about me? Advantageously so who is it about?? It’s about your analyze of the class, your accept on things, how the class appears finished your own single lens, and yes, you need to compose from your own emotional experience, or at the real least you need to compose about something you care about. But that’s where it ends. Piece you are writing from a place inside yourself, or you’re channeling something from the depths of your cold, you are allay doing it with one real important proviso. You are disengaging your ego, and writing from any deep inner actuality, or emotional place. Get out of your ego and into the feeling or character of your characters. You are a writer. You are thither to assist the account. It’s not thither to assist you.
A great idea is to have an imaginary hat booth, coat rack or even a cardboard box outside the door of the room where you compose. Every time you enter the room to do any writing, mentally drop all your baggage, problems, ego issues and any other personal issues into the box or hang them on the racks and walk into the room burdenless. So, piece you are writing, imagine that individual or something comes and whisks all your baggage, problems and issues away, so that when you’re finished, the doorstep is empty.
2. Affect the material with honesty, dignity and without embellishment.
I firmly believe that when you are writing, you are co-creating with a force larger than yourself. Whether you call that force God, the Collection, the collective cold, the character of your dearly departed grandmother, Allah or simply your Higher Consciousness, when you truly enter the creative imagination you are only one element in many that go into making up the aggregate of your account. So when the material comes finished (when you compose it) you do need to affect it with honesty, dignity and without embellishment. Let it flow finished you honestly. Don’t attempt and change it as it flows. Just let it flow, get it down on the page, and if thither are changes that need to be made, address them in the rewriting and editing processes. Dignify the material with your time and your skills, and for goodness sake, don’t embellish. Thither is nothing worsened than a fantastic account and good writing being asphyxiated by attempts at literary high-mindedness. If the character gets hit in the head, tell us he gets hit in the head. Don’t tell us that a large object projected itself into his cranium. Be blunt and consume simple language. You will find the greatest writers do that. At the risk of superficial like another American self-help guru, you’re best served to “tell it like it is”. Thanks Dr Phil!
Go back over any of your own writing and accompany where you may have been guilty of embellishment. The beauty and complexities of great novels come from the account, the narrative, the rich drawing of characters and their relationships to each other, not from exploitation lots of big words.
3. Surface fully no matter how many people are in the audience.
Compose for the curve joy of it, the pleasure, the beauty, peace and spirit it stirs in you. Compose because you have to, because you can’t not compose. Compose because thither’s a account that’s bursting to get out of you. Don’t compose to please editors, publishers, readers, your mother, educator or partner. Compose for the meaning of abundance it brings into your life. Activity up at the blank page or check and compose just for the heck of it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the only one who’ll read your words or whether you have a print run of 1,000,000 books ready to roll when you finish your manuscript. What matters is that you surface fully at the page, every day. Because writing in and of itself, is all that matters, isn’t it?
So next time you’re motion at your page cerebration “what am I doing here?” have a look at these 3 simple Truths About (The Writing) Life and remember how simple it really is. You compose because you can’t not compose. So leave your personal problems at the door, affect the material with honesty, dignity and without embellishment and surface fully at the page, no matter how many people are in the audience.
And follow your writing improve.