Writing Craft: What Nobody Ever Told Me
In the beginning, your skill is not equal to your taste…
When I was much younger, I took a trip to the Grand Canyon. I was still in the military and having traveled around the world, I thought it was weird to be going to a landmark in my home country, after seeing so much of the world in my travels. I did not expect to be impressed.
It goes without saying: I was utterly and completely wrong.
It was one of the most impressive things I had ever seen. Nothing I could visualize in my mind prepared me for the incomprehensibility, the vastness, the size, and the scope of this natural phenomena crafted by millions of years of natural processes.
I simply didn’t have the words for it at the time because the images of it I had in my mind were simply not able to convey the majesty of the location. This is exactly the same thing that happened when I heard a speech given by Peabody Award winner, Ira Glass on the act of creativity.
This was the first writing advice I had ever taken seriously because it reached inside of me and painted the disconnect between what I thought about writing and writers whose works moved me, and my process of writing which always made me feel woefully inadequate to the task.
I could sense the disconnect between what I wanted to make and what I was actually making and kept wanting to make that discomfort go away. If you want to be a writer (or any kind of artist — an article for another day, feeling as if I was not really suited to the life of an artist), that discomfort is part of the problem, part of the process, and a means of knowing you are slowly, imperceptibly getting better.
Ira Glass: regarding Creativity
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.
And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this.
And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.
It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
The real takeaway from Ira’s statement:
It is this sense of what is good versus our current talent level which challenges us when we are editing our work. We know what looks good and what sounds good to us, but we have a hard time figuring out how to make our work reflect what we know in our bones to be good.
Part of that is a fear of being not as good as the work we admire most. As we become more comfortable with our writing, our voices, our styles; as we grow more familiar with our capabilities, editing will grow easier.
We will find ourselves editing during the writing, adding only what we need, and more willing and able to remove whatever we sense will overburden our stories, making them sluggish, languid or otherwise unable to move our souls or our readers.
Writing is the art, editing is the craft.
It is this fusion of the two we must bring into balance for effective and meaningful storytelling.
The same storytelling ability to move the reader, to trigger a sense of recognition, a sense of longing for desires unfulfilled, of lives not lived, of passions not pursued; this is the mission of art, to reveal to the person exposed to your art, a secret world they did not know they wanted to experience, to be part of something they never knew existed.
If you are an artist, this feeling is the thing you seek to feel as well. To connect to a place inside yourself whose boundaries were beyond your ability to conceive of; to see and sense your spiritual Grand Canyon and use your art to make it real to someone outside of yourself.
Art is the recreation of a private, impossible majesty, the sharing of an inner world with another; revealing to them an opportunity to know their own inner world through the revelation of your own.
You free them to seek out the majesty in themselves. This is the true goal of art.
Other Writing Craft Articles:
Thaddeus Howze is a writer, essayist, author and professional storyteller for mysterious beings who exist in non-Euclidean realms beyond our understanding. Since they insist on constant entertainment and can’t subscribe to cable, Thaddeus writes a variety of forms of speculative fiction to appease their hunger for new entertainment.
Thaddeus’ speculative fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies:Awesome Allshorts: Last Days and Lost Ways (Australia, 2014), The Future is Short(2014), Visions of Leaving Earth (2014), Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond (2014), Genesis Science Fiction (2013), Scraps (UK, 2012), and Possibilities (2012).
He has written two books: a collection called Hayward’s Reach (2011) and an e-book novella called Broken Glass (2013) featuring Clifford Engram, Paranormal Investigator.
