I have a knack for saying things no one wants to hear. Why
do I feel the urge to say such things? Because no one else is. In a world where
everything is determined by the market, no one wants to speak unpopular
opinions for fear of tarnishing their “brand”, of alienating potential market
segments, of potentially making less money. But writing to me is not primarily about
making money, it is about providing the world with something useful. Therefore,
let me provide some atypical suggestions for writers.
My advice to writers would be this: be honest, be bold, and
be articulate. I considered adding “be passionate”, but one cannot be bold
without a good amount of passion.
You need to be bold, need to believe your writing matters.
Because the time you spend writing will be time ripped from your children, your
widowed mother, your friends and family members. It will be time away from
household chores and repairs, from playing with puppies under blue skies on
summer days. MAKE THAT TIME COUNT. Imagine you are bringing into the world
something it desperately needs, some new insight or a pathway forwards from
lives that can sometimes seem meaningless. You write in order to give the world
hope, or beauty, or truth, or joy. If you cannot give that to the world through
your writing, perhaps you can give it to others in your immediate life through your
presence. In other words, perhaps writing is not the appropriate medium for
you. The overall goal is not to write, but to give to the world something you
alone can give. Each of us has something unique to give the world, some of us
do so through writing. That is a bold notion, but it is the only one that can
keep me from stopping my work and giving my dog a belly rub, or fixing that
leaky sink.
You’ll have to convince yourself that even those moments of
doing nothing while settling in are more important than anything else on your
agenda. Of course, you will have to learn when to flip that switch from
procrastinating to creating. Procrastination is a necessary part of the writing
process, because we need to stay in the physical writing area even when the
drive and the inspiration is taking a break. It is an important skill to
determine how much is too much distraction.
Be bold enough to give the world something new. Take a quick
gander at the books on the shelves of your local thrift shop, peruse Amazon, or
go to your library’s next book sale. The amount of books available not only for
sale but being given away is almost unimaginable. And most of them differ
little from a thousand others just like them. If you write for yourself, then
by all means write however you wish, walk down a trail blazed by countless
others before you, many of whom defined and perfected the genre. But if you
write to be read, present readers with something new, something fresh, something
different. Elevate your writing so that your book might be elevated above the
millions of others sitting on the shelves.
Be honest. Writing is communication. Fiction, even science
fiction and fantasy, is a mere framework upon which we can hang enduring
truths. Let your characters be real and let them act according to
understandable motivations. There’s nothing that bothers me more when a writer
has a character do something to further the plot when it makes little sense to
the character’s character.
Make your heroes and your villains real. Invest a degree of
your own motivations in them. Place into their characters qualities you
recognize and understand from people you know.
Make them human. We have enough celebrities and fictional
characters who give to us a false sense of what human beings are. Perhaps they
sell product, but it comes at the expense of humanity’s understanding of
itself. You have an obligation as a writer to your readers, not simply to
entertain them, but to enrich them. If you believe your only obligation is to
entertain readers, you are like a parent who allows his children to eat
anything they want. You are like a restaurant owner who loads his dishes with
lard and salt. You are like a man who tells a woman exactly what she wants to
hear in order for him to get what he wants. You are responsible for what you
write, there’s no denying it, no tossing that responsibility upon the market
place and leaving it to decide morality. Trusting the market to be the arbiter
of morality hasn’t worked, doesn’t work, and it will be the ruin of humanity if
we continue to make excuses for creating bad writing.
Be articulate. Choose your words carefully. Read them out
loud and see if they speak to you the way you intended them to sound.
This is where the art and craft come in, rather than passion
and vision.
Make sure the words you use do not accidentally convey a
different meaning. But at the same time, do not be afraid to have your words
convey more than one meaning or one idea at a time. Writing, especially
fiction, is capable of layering meanings and motifs atop one another. Your
writing can convey a surface message while also including underlying meaning.
Like musical composition, writing can contain notes beyond those in the melody
that not only augment the central idea but contain meaning and rhythm of their
own.
I know this advice overlooks the primary concern most
writers are wanting to have answered, namely: “How do I get rich from writing?”
That is because “How do I get rich/successful?” should never be a question you
should ask. You, as both a human being and a writer, should pursue passion
rather than riches. Riches are a poor substitute for having lived a passionate
life. You cannot hold on to your riches for long. They don’t, in the end,
provide either security or validation of your worth to others. When you die,
your riches will be given to others, and the least worthy and least moral among
them will be the ones to sponge up whatever estate you hope to bequeath to your
loved ones.
But your honesty, your passion, and your appreciation for
craft have a chance at reaching out into eternity. What you create in such a
fashion will always find the right people. It will encourage them to do better,
to be better. You will be held in the highest of esteem by those most like you.
Who could aspire to more?
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