Writing is a sacred art – a craft of conjuring ways to string together words that trigger thought.
There is vast infinity between the capital letter that begins a sentence and the closing period. Ideas come alive through words. Well-chosen words are a short-cut to communicating meaning. Writers know full well that they can choose a completely different set of words to convey the same idea — yet all words have nuances, often changing the entire meaning by where one word appears in a sentence.
In short, there are good, better, best ways to capture that concept by the alignment of words. It is often deleting the noise of the wrong words. It is often the lean and succinct that work best. The disciplined and skilled writer owns only the final version. Wiped away by keystrokes are the dry runs, those phrasings that almost worked, or that which was inexact, mushy, prosaic.
Iconic writers, who composed in long hand, left behind drafts for biographers to pore over in quest of the formulas they followed in their emergent ideas and their painstaking journey of deducing what they wanted to say. Yet how many profound phrasings or whole thoughts of import were abandoned in a draft?
Writing, of course, is a rhythm. Trained writing follows a pace. It keeps ever in mind the expectant reader and the greater audience. It anticipates readers to be on different points of understanding, scholarship and interpretation. Writers may be intentional and exact as to their audience, making no apologies for 50-cent words, writing to an earthy, pedestrian audience, use of profanity or failing to be interesting to casual readers.
Avid readers, of course, quickly assess writers’ skills. If they are locked into a genre of novels, for example, they have expectations about character development, pacing of the story, laying out the environment and consistency. What greater good is there than a writer who delivers book after book after book to an audience with an addiction for their works? I find myself resenting my favorite authors who have somehow ended writing. How dare I be deprived!
As one who spent more than a half-century writing news and feature stories, columns and blogs, I have failed to explore whether I have the skills for fiction. I marvel how well fiction-writing can be carried out. I measure fiction-writers’ success by how quickly I get lost in the story, how much it has stirred my imagination and how much time has passed between the plunge into the text and my reading break, my return to self-consciousness.
Surely there could be ideas without the written word, as tribes with oral histories attest. Yet what else so advances us so efficiently than those ideas put to paper or computer screen to be read, digested, commented on and conveyed with an inherent permanence.
Editor’s Note: We are proud to have Lawn Griffiths as our guest contributor. Check our his blog: Lawn Cares | Someone Has to Say It.
