Writing Demystified
Find your unique voice––clear, simple tools for everyone.
Get Personal
Ponder This
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
—Ray Bradbury, Writer's Digest
“Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.”
Writer's Digest
“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”
—Steve Almond, Writer's Digest
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
"Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words."
---Mark Twain
"The first draft of anything is shit."
"Literature — creative literature — unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable."
Often I had to drag students’ personal experiences out of them. For whatever reason, many have been taught (or have learned) to keep their lives secret, revealing only superficial information to those about them. Perhaps in school they were encouraged to keep their academic writing general . . . the myth here is the more general, the more people can identify. It just isn’t so.
Our brains store memories in neurons which connect to each other as we make associations. These paths between neurons become well travelled over time, and some side attractions may be added. For instance, I associate oranges with California, specifically the Fresno area where I grew up because there were orange orchards near my house and we passed them on our way to town. In addition, I now have a slew of additional memories associated with oranges—specific experiences I’ve had with oranges since I was a child. All our memories are little clusters that connect one to another based on our individual experiences; but, if I tell you mine, you’re likely to connect by associating it with yours—more likely, in fact, than if I make a general statement.
Take the following example:
People are cruel, especially when they’re teenagers. There ought to be a law specifically preventing teenagers from communicating with the general public. In addition, parents should force their teenagers to learn restraint, or forbid them from speaking or otherwise communicating.
This sounds extreme and unreasonable to me, and I wrote it. Because it is so general, I’m not allowing my reader to make any connection to the material, nor am I giving the reader any reason for my feelings. The reader is likely to dismiss me as a crazy “hater” who is simply cranky and lacks an understanding of young people today. Since this is not what I want to communicate, I have created a problem for myself and, in effect, discredited myself. Compare the above with the following, more personal example:
I watched him from across the room, flirting with her. Thinking my longing was undetected by the self-absorbed pair, I, too late, noticed her glaring at me. Burying my face in my book, I wasn’t quick enough. “You want him to kiss you?” Sheri said it with venom dripping off the words like rotting sugar.
“No…I…I…I was looking for Tammy,” speaking softly, I looked away, seeking refuge in something, anything.
“Four eyes, you’re so ugly my dog wouldn’t kiss you. Now stop looking at my boyfriend and go crawl back to the rock you live under.” Humiliated in front of my classmates, I couldn’t speak at all, unwanted tears coming to my eyes. It seemed every day she found a new way to torment me—a new way to tell me she was beautiful and I was not. I cried a lot that freshman year of high school.
In this example, you see the reason I think teenagers are cruel, but because I’ve shown you what happened to me, you probably sympathize (or maybe think I’m a dork). Either way, I’ve communicated to you something more accurate, and allowed you to access your memories of being a freshman in high school. If you didn’t get picked on, chances are you picked on someone, or knew someone who got picked on. I’ll bet you connected to those memories, even if it was unconsciously, while reading about my experience. In addition, I’ve given you even more information about myself; I was in love with a boy who didn’t notice me. Who in life can’t relate to that?
Getting personal allows your reader to connect to their own personal experiences, which in turn gives your writing more impact. When you offer your own experience you activate the natural human curiosity we all have. We love stories—even if we don’t love to read. Why do you think everyone talks about Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears? When we hear gossip involving the stars' latest buffoonery, we want to hear the whole story. Some of us even make up details to make the story more interesting, suspenseful, outrageous, or compelling. A good yarn keeps us rapt, and stars open themselves up to gossip because their personal lives are lived in the public eye.
How many times have you called up a friend and said, “You’ll never guess what happened to me today . . . ”? We itch to tell our stories, to hear our friends say, “No way” or “Oh my God!” We want to feel the drama of our experience, and share that drama with those closest to us. When we write about any topic, no matter how academic it may be, finding a personal angle is always a good way to get your reader hooked into reading more. Our lives are a series of stories, and ultimately in this human experience we all share, the stories we hear are what motivate, scare, thrill, excite and comfort us.
Find your personal avenue to the topic you choose. Use your prewriting to activate your memories, and use those memories to communicate your experience to your readers. Ultimately, you’ll have an easier time explaining what freedom is if you talk about your experiences with it than if you talk from a place above, a place where the reader can’t gauge your intent, knowledge, experience or credibility.
Get personal. Use what you know, what you have experienced, what you think about those experiences and what you have done about them to show your reader your point of view instead of trying to convince them with big words and generalities. Life may or may not be a bowl of cherries; but life certainly is unique for every human experiencing it. I might describe my life as “a bowl of mixed fruit, some of which is rotten,” and someone else might say, “a bowl of kumquats, rare and odd, but good once you get used to them.” I’m borrowing the bowl-of-fruit-as-life comparison, but you see that both of my metaphors are much more interesting than the tried and boring “bowl of cherries.”
Use the uniqueness of your experience to make your writing stand out from the pack.