“If you don’t have a book about writing as a craft, you are not a writer.”
That’s how things move in the writing world. A writer has to write a craft book on becoming a writer. Writing as a craft is complex, even though it looks simple from the outskirts. As a kid, I grew up enjoying writing. Writing stories, chapters from my science books, my own notes, and homework was my usual go-to writing ideas. I won the handwriting competitions.
Life has changed. I moved on. One thing that has remained constant, is writing.
I have read at least four different books about writing as a craft. There are a few more in my home library. They never get boring.
In my Zen in the art of writing, I talked about writing as a craft from Ray Bradbury’s perspective. In the same book, I came across Becoming a writer by Dorothea Brande. The curiosity compounds over time. So I bought this book and started reading.
The ideas from this book resonate with me. Writing is a journey. It’s never a destination. Each story you write is a station along the way. You will never reach the endpoint except only when you die. But your writing will live forever.
The uniqueness of life lies in the things that we create when we are alive. Writing that journey will help future generations to uncover you and your stories. So write and publish. There has been no better time to write than now.
Becoming a writer
In this book, Dorothea has one main idea of consciousness and unconsciousness. As a human, if you are self-aware, you should never suppress those two sides of you. Every writer has a multiple personality disorder. One persona dictates the logical side and other persona dictate the creative side. They must go together hand in hand, they must create something in tandem. They are interdependent.
It should not be your sensitive, temperamental self which bears the burden of your relations with the outside world of editors, teachers, or friends. Send your practical self out into the world to receive suggestions, criticisms, or rejections.
Too stimulating a social life can be as hard on a budding talent as none at all. Only observation will show you the effect of any group or person on you as a writer.
You will have to find other persons who, for some mysterious reasons, leave you full of energy, feed you with ideas.
In short, you will have to learn to be your own best friend and severest critic – mature, indulgent, stern, and yielding by turns.
Trusting your instinct
The writer must learn to trust his own feelings for the story and to relax in the telling, until he has learned to use the sure, deft stroke of the man who is the master of his medium.
In short, the writer should trust his instinct about the story he is writing. Initially, it won’t be easy. But if he gets the idea of a story, he should wait for a few days before jumping into it. If the idea persists, excitement persists, that’s the story he should write about. Most of the time, he should learn the art of story from someone who is the master of storytelling.
Struggles of a writer
Most beginning writers struggle on the two aspects of writing. They find a great idea to write a story about, but then fluency the writers need to write it has flown out the window, or that when they let themselves go on a loose rein, suddenly the story is out of hand.
Fluency of writing OR the story. Master these two crafts and you will do better as a writer.
Foster Imagination
The imagination plays a far greater role in our lives than we customarily acknowledge, although any teacher can tell you how great an advocate the imagination is when a child is to be led into a changed course.
All writers should work on fostering their imagination. Imagination will improve when you maintain curiosity. So these two qualities are the most important for any writer.
Two lessons
Every writer needs to learn – that it is possible to write for long periods without fatigue, and that if one pushes on past the first weariness one finds a reservoir of unsuspected energy – one reaches the famous “second wind”.
Morning Routine
Every morning, wake up half an hour before your regular wake up time. Just as soon as you can – and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before – begin to write.
Throughout your writing life, whenever you are in danger of the spiritual drought that comes to the most facile writers from time to time, put the pencil and paperback on your bedside table, and wake to write in the morning.
Early morning writing and writing by prearrangement should be kept up till you write fluently at will.
Reading as a writer
Read. Read a lot. And read a variety of books. But as a writer, read the books of authors you appreciate, twice. The first reading should be to understand the story. The second reading should be slow and with an eye of critique.
Enlarge any statements you liked or not liked. Criticize those statements. Try to rewrite them. Were the characters drawn with uniform skill, badly drawn, or inconsistent only occasionally? Do any of the scenes stand out in your mind?
When you will know your own weaknesses, you will look at other writers’ work with a different angle – How does this author handle these situations?
Write down questions about the book and try to answer those questions. Make a check against those questions that you were not able to answer.
In the second reading, you should try to find answers to your questions. How the character was developed? What are the flaws and strengths of the characters? How do those characters act?
- The philosophies, the ideas, the dramatic notions of other writers of fiction should not be directly adopted. If you find them congenial, go back to the sources from which those authors originally drew their ideas, if you are able to find them. There study the primary sources and take any items over into your own work only when they have your deep acquiescence—never
- When you have found a passage, long or short, which seems to you far better than anything of the sort you are yet able to do, sit down and learn from it.
Study the words the writer is using, the sentences, story everything in detail. Practice this often and you will understand the details of writing.
By choosing an author whose style is complementary to your own you can teach yourself a great deal about sentence formation and prose rhythm in this way.