WRITING 101

                                                            

One of the things my old age often brings out in me is regrets. One of my bigger regrets is why I didn’t start writing, more seriously, sooner in my life. But with that being said, I now know that most writers are the sum of their life experiences so you need to live the story, before you can tell the story. Writing, like most things in life, needs material to work with to create stories. Of all of the institutes of learning we may be privileged to join and learn at, there is one learning entity that has no minimum age to join and really has no graduation. Were all members whether we like it or not. It’s called life itself. It has an unlimited supply of teachers, bringing you a new chapter of life’s curriculum, every day of your life. How well you remember what you have learned, will be the secret to your success.

So I ask you. “How do you write about love if you’ve never known love. Never experienced love. Never loved and won or lost? How do you write about grief, sadness and bitter disappointment, unless you’ve experienced that dark side of life?” As a writer your imagination may become the ways to the means but it will only work for you when you yourself can fill in the blanks that will be there in your imagination. You might write a lot of stories but they will be short on substance.

To write is to create. Just as a sculpture shapes a statue-- as a painter turns tubes of color into a replica of a scene their eyes have seen—as musicians blend lyrics and melody together to bring us some melodious message that melt our hearts and lighten are spirits. Writers, in turn, take their imaginations and tell a story using the characters and places their minds have created. It may take them hours to write one paragraph that could be written in a minute by someone with no imagination. The characters themselves have no life, no substance at all, until the writer fleshes them out and gives them personalities and identities and makes them as real as life itself. But at the same time, I as a writer must be careful and allow your imagination to work too. The Laura I created in my story and picture in my mind may well be something totally different, when seen in your mind and that’s okay. It helps you personalize the story. It’s not important how Laura looks but it is more important how Laura thinks, feels and acts. For deep within each of us-- real or otherwise, that’s where the real you lie’s.

Edward Albbe said” The act of writing is an act of optimism. You wouldn’t’ take the trouble to do it if you didn’t think it mattered.” Like dairy cows that need to be milked everyday, good writers need to write every day. Detail, detail, detail, always in writing. It’s the difference between a pencil drawing and an oil painting. Good writers are good readers because that’s how you learn. You try to emulate the great ones. Isaac Asimov said, “If the doctor told him he had only six minutes to live he wouldn’t brood. He would just type a little faster.” As for me, you are the judge of what I write-- not I. But getting back to my age I saw this Quote and have no idea where it came from but it speaks volumes to me. “I am as old as my accomplishments and as young as the things I still want to do.”