I learned this rule from personal experience.ĥ. So when you write something especially clever, unique or “arty,” double check it to make sure it makes sense. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce or Cormac McCarthy, and neither are you. ![]() Look out for especially “arty writing” The best writing is unlike anything anyone has ever seen before. But you can ask yourself, “Do I really know what this word means?” “Am I using it correctly?” “Will my intended audience get what I am trying to say?” Spend more time on longer sentences and bigger words.Ĥ. Now, I hear you saying, “Whoa, I don’t have that much time.” True. James Joyce spent whole days writing just a handful of words, spending hours thinking about them and their meaning. Think about the meaning of every word you write. Think about your reader, and write to them, being aware of how they will react to your words.ģ. Who is your intended audience? If you’re writing your church newsletter, then you probably aren’t going to want to include any swear words. When you revise your work ask yourself, “Does this convey what I want to convey?” Ask yourself this question after every line, especially when writing fiction.Ģ. You follow the Golden Rule every time you write, because you express what you mean every time you write, because you are writing for yourself.)īelow, I have seven tips for implementing intentionality behind your writing, to better convey what you want to say.ġ. Your intention needs to jibe with what you want them take away from you work. The lesson was clear: these were my words, dammit, and I needed to own them.Īs my above example shows, the Golden Rule of Writing is not an easy one, especially when you write for readers. Or perhaps the idea or the image I meant to convey wasn’t being conveyed. Perhaps I meant to put the words together, as a poetic statement. He didn’t tell me what words to use, he didn’t tell me my mistake. Notice how my professor coached me on my writing. (I hear the guy in the back saying, what if I want my writing to be confusing? Then be confusing, but do it intentionally.) Writing is communication don’t we all want to communicate as accurately as possible? What is my Golden Rule of Writing? It’s this:īe aware of what your words mean, and make sure that the meaning aligns with what you are trying to say. The questions the professor asked us over the course of the quarter were always the same, “What do you mean?” “What did you intend here?” or “Why did you use this word?” The lesson wasn’t that I needed to be clearer and more precise with my language–though I did–it was that I didn’t know what my words meant. Light could either barely trickle in, or flood in, but it couldn’t do both. “But how can light ‘barely flood’ in? Do you mean the word flood?” “Well, it is sunrise, and the sun is coming up.” I said. He turned to me, “Eric, what do you mean, ‘Light barely flooded into the room.’?” “Wait.” Less than a sentence in, the Professor stopped the student reading my story. The story began, “Light barely flooded into the room.” I had spent some time writing it, one day rewriting it, and another afternoon editing it. I learned the Golden Rule of Writing on my second day in class, as my story about a farmer and a mule was read aloud. What rule can cover journalism and blogging, poetry and prose authors like James Joyce, who struggled to write seven words a day, or Nora Roberts, who writes multiple books a year? If a golden rule exists, it needs to unite all writers. How can any rule possibly apply to everyone? I co-write my blog with my twin brother, and we don’t write the same way. The problem with learning the “rules” for writing is that none of them apply to everyone. We were a microcosm of the rest of the writing universe: no two writers write the same way. Some of us needed two drafts, others needed dozens. We were men and women, young and old, lazy and prolific, borderline illiterate and consummate professionals. We wrote literary fiction, memoirs, and detective stories newspaper articles, editorials, and e-mails. ![]() Our professor wrote memoir fiction about his sexual escapades in the Caribbean standing at a lectern a la Hemingway. Some wrote in the morning at their home, others at night with friends I wrote by myself at the library in the afternoon. ![]() Some students wrote on computers, others in journals I wrote long hand on legal pads. Our teacher, an old bald Caribbean man with missing front teeth and a stoop, began by asking the class, “How do you write?” My classmates and I first had to learn how different we were from one another as writers. Of course, I didn’t learn the rule immediately, or even in the first class. I learned what I consider the “Golden Rule of Writing” – the only rule that can help every writer – in the first creative writing class I ever took.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |