Writing craft is hard.
How do you suck in a reader with words? How do you make something come alive to them, reveal the story and its characters in a manner that makes them feel real and alive, and therefore worthy of our joy and pain?
And its not as simple as knowing what the problems are with a written piece, it’s also knowing how to FIX those problems. When someone says “this didn’t work,” or “I didn’t understand this,” how do we rewrite those problematic or confusing words in a way that fixes it and sucks them in?
There’s a lot about my own writing skill, such as it is at this moment which honestly isn’t saying much but there is SOME there…I don’t know how I know what to do. It’s been an unconscious journey to this point. It wasn’t super intentional.
I think what I did early on was read a lot, and then try to emulate what I was reading. That’s how everyone starts, I’ve been told by reputable people. But in terms of why it’s progressed from my earlier imitations to a small step or two beyond that…I don’t really know.
A lot of life happened in between. I learned some things that forced me to grow up. I went to theater school and learned how to break down story and character. And I continued to read and write.
I want to be a lot more intentional now about my writing, observing what my process really is, how I build my stories and my scenes and my characters and my paragraphs and my sentences. And I want to be intentional with all that because I think I want to teach someday. I want to understand what makes good writing so that I can teach it.
The first step on that path is definitely mastering my own craft. I have many, many, maaannnyyyy words to write and lessons about making my writing better before I feel like I’m ready to teach it…but I do want to get there, eventually.
There is nothing like a well-told story. They way they can strike right directly into the deepest parts of us, parts that we often have no other language to express or route to access…stories get right in there. We need stories. They help us cope, teach us about life, and keep us sane.
I want to tell stories like that. And once I do, I want to know how I did it.