Friday, November 17, 2017

Beauty And Truth: A Guide For Writers And Other Human Beings



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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