I am a writer. Sorry if that sounds trite, but to state it is one of Elizabeth Berg's suggestions in Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True. When I read (and reviewed) The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted, I learned of this book, and decided to track it down.
I find I have written nearly 650 posts, about two-thirds book reviews. I write to please myself, though I find I'm quite tickled when an author likes my review and comments to say so. The proportion of book reviews has dropped since I began posting more often. I used to post about twice a week; that has about doubled. But I am still reading at about the same rate. In a sense, I am following Robert Heinlein's advice, who wrote, "Write a story every week. I defy anyone to write 52 bad stories in a row." He's probably been proven wrong. I am hoping I haven't written 600+ bad essays in a row! But I know, according to Sturgeon's Law, "90% of everything is junk." That's OK.
I have two places I write. One is the office of my day job, where I'll either write a post over my lunch break, or come in early enough to write one before the day begins. Perhaps someday I'll look over these two kinds of posts to see how they differ. The other is a dedicated "computer room" at home, where any posts I write in the evening, or at insomniac hours, emerge.
All of these accord with suggestions by Ms Berg. She also strongly urges journaling. I wonder if blogging qualifies. When I was very young (a pre-teen) I wrote daily in a journal, but in a cipher, being shy. I've lost those journals. This blog is as close to a journal as I have now. So, I don't have the paper journal that Ms Berg suggests writers use for private thoughts. I may have to remedy that, for she has a chapter that totally floored me: "If you're a man, be a woman: exercises to unleash your creativity". That's 33 pages of short suggestions that she fully expects a serious student of writing to take up, one by one (though not in order). At about ten per page, there are more than 300 of these suggestions! Here are a random dozen:
- Getting a puppy
- Describe three kinds of rain.
- __________ children. [you fill in the blank, then write a page or few]
- The worst date you ever had
- Describe a scene by starting with a wide-angle view, the moving in for a close-up. Now do the opposite.
- Your father begins by saying, "It's time to tell you something." Finish what he says.
- The man is not crying, but you know his heart is breaking. How do you know?
- What I always wanted most was his ____________.
- Use these three words in a short paragraph: baseball, poetry, fortune cookie.
- as likely as a trip to ___________.
- Room by room, describe your ideal house.
- your favorite cup
Though there is a chapter, "Myths to Ignore", I find much of the book to be overturning myths and other faulty ideas. The prime focus is to define what a writer is. In short, a writer writes. People write for different reasons. My son, a good writer, primarily writes to fulfill his college assignments. Most writers enjoy writing. Those that don't mainly quit after a while. Some writers love writing, and it is these that we most enjoy reading.
I remember Isaac Asimov, among whose 400+ books, nearly 300 were nonfiction. He wrote for hours every day, keeping four manuscrips going at any one time, rotating among them. When asked, "What would you do if you knew you would die in two weeks?", he replied, "Type faster." His joy in writing shines through. To a critical eye, the quality of his writing is variable, but it is uniformly enjoyable to read. Elizabeth Berg has that same quality. She writes as she breathes, because she must.
Much of her instruction and advice is for those who wish to write fiction, particularly those who think they can't write fiction. It boils down to "Write what you know", and we all know more than we think we do. In particular, to be human is to be complex. You don't have to be insane to recognize that you have many strong facets to your personality, some of which can at times "take over" and operate independently (For someone who is Bipolar, as I am, it is like there are mainly two people in there, one cheerful, one rather morose or thoughtful, who alternate control). Every writer builds characters by mining this internal storehouse of personalities. I think, even when we write nonfiction in the first person, we use fictional story-telling methods.
Writing is not so much creating theme, plot, character, and so forth out of whole cloth, but of winnowing nuggets of passion and meaning from a remembered and imagined life full of events both precious and drab. When I remember a signal event, and want to tell the story, I know that I dare not recount every detail; that could take hours, and I have half a minute. I have to extract a few key details that support and lead to the conclusion, the response I want to elicit.
Just a couple of days ago, I was with one of my most long-standing friends. He lives a continent away, so we had decades to catch up on. We spent five hours together, and it went by so fast, I was astonished when I noticed it had got dark outside. Now, if he and I wrote down what we said, would it make something others would enjoy reading? I don't know, but I realized later that every life is rich with story material, whether I want to tell the stories as fiction or not. The brother of a rancher friend of mine in South Dakota is an English teacher and author. I read one of his books, and said to him later, "It sounds like plain fact told with different names." His red-faced grin let me know I had him pegged.
My favorite kind of fiction is science fiction. As I've matured, I've realized when I get away from the Tom Swift-style juvenile adventures for the sake of adventure and whiz-bang gizmos, that sci-fi is about people and how they grow, just as much as is "mainstream" fiction. The stories are told on a more speculative stage.
I don't know if I'll ever write for paid publication. My published work to date is technical, (except for a few poems printed in a rockhounding journal) and either unpaid or I paid the page charges. As much as I like reading sci-fi, I don't know if I could write any. I am most comfortable writing essays and opinion pieces. And a blogger doesn't need an agent to market the work or an editor to accept and prepare it. That suits my lazy nature. But I may try some of those 300 journal exercises…
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