Writing the Way You Speak

This is a book about writing. It is about creating the best written communications that you can.

For the most part, however, I am not concerned with specific writing techniques. I don’t discuss, God forbid, grammar, punctuation, or spelling! These things are all important in their own way, I suppose. I’ll even touch on them when it seems relevant or important, but I do not believe they are germane to the art, or craft, of writing. Furthermore, I really don’t care that much about them.

This book is not about writing for a specific genre. For example, you can find books about how to write screen plays, or science fiction. Indeed, there are quite a few books that provide information about writing for many different genres. The information in these books can be formal: for example, how should a screen play be formatted? Or content-oriented: What explicit and/or emotional content needs to go into the work? Some of the better books about writing for a specific genre also address questions of structure and narrative.

And, supposing I’ve created a great X, where X might be a novel, or a screen play, or a work of non-fiction, or whatever: how do I market it to a publisher? Or find an agent for it?

There are quite a few books that address genre writing, and other books that claim to explain the business of writing. Some of the better ones are mentioned in the Resources section at the end of this book. But you won’t find much material in my book about how to write in a particular genre, or how to market what you have written.

Now that I’ve ruled out most of the known universe of what you thought would be useful to you in a book about writing, and stated that you will not find it in this book, let me try to answer the question that you might now be posing: What is this book about?

This book is about the urge to write. For some people, this urge becomes a necessity. Where does this urge come from, and what is it about? I believe that we all have it to some degree or other. What can you do to fan its flames? What is writing about, and what is important about writing?

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