Writing the Way You Speak, page 6

What is Writing About?, continued

As an aside, judging the integrity of a writer is an interesting issue. Readers usually make this kind of call based solely on a writer’s work. You may glance at the author’s picture, read the publisher’s blurb on the cover, or remember something you heard about the author, but for the most part the words written by the author are the only evidence used to decide whether that writer has credibility. How wonderful to dialog without intermediaries with your readers! How terrible for the writer who in the end does not seem credible.

Writing, like life, can be deceptive and tricky. Narrators can lie and writers can be paid to present a viewpoint that is not their own. Non-linear structure can mask a linear narrative; conversely, the ideas presented in a linear narrative may make no sense at all.

The moral for a reader is that, as in life, it pays to be skeptical. But if you are so skeptical that you are always seeing the worst in everything, then (as in life) you won’t experience magic. In the same spirit that “’tis better to have loved and lost than never loved at all,” it is better to have read and wept and been made a fool of than never to have lost oneself in words at all.

Stretch Your Brain

1. Just Start Writing

   Get a small notebook specially to carry around with you. Carry it with you everywhere you go for a week. When you discover anything interesting with any of your senses, without fail write down a description of what it is. In other words, if you see, hear, smell, taste, or tough anything notable, write down what you perceived in your notebook.

   The point of this exercise is to help you write easily, and to become a more fluid writer.

Continued next page

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