Lessons to Becoming a Writer

My Writing Foundations class is one of my favorite classes.
I've mentioned before that in this class I had written an Photo-Autobiography. Which I would recommend people to do. It's kinda amazing. Sorta like scrap booking, but with more words. Rather then the pictures being the center of attention and the words supporting, the words are the main attraction with the pictures being complementary.

The lectures of the class:

Lecture number One
1. Pick a subject that means something to you
2. Have a Reason to write
3. Turn your feelings to account

Lecture number Two
Details = Power

What else have I learned?
That view point matters, that description matters, that the small details in words give a story power. That's what the element of great story telling is. Details. That's why stories told by my mother and family are always silly and rather interesting. Details.

The other day we were required to read an essay entitled "Letting the Light Shine Through" written by Deborah Harrison. What an essay!! Let's see if I can quickly summarize the main points.

1. Style: "It encompasses clarity and coherence and conciseness and voice. But it adds up to more than these individual considerations. ... Our style is made up of the choices we make in presenting our ideas."
2. "Writing forces us to think. The process of writing is thinking."
3. Clarity: "Deep or complex ideas need not be expressed in obscure ways. Indeed they shouldn't be."
4. Coherence: "A coherent essay is one that simply makes sense; it moves logically and smoothly from idea to idea."
5. Conciseness: "When we write, we want the most amount of pawer from the least number of words."
6. Voice: "I mean that you, your personality, or how you want readers to perceive you comes off the page, that I can hear you speaking in your own matchless way, that I can feel you genuinely wish to engage me as your reader."
7. Title: Walker Percy "A good title should be like a metaphor: It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious" (Trimble, 2000, p. 180)
8. "Which person we choose, either first, second, or third person, affects the distance we create between ourselves and our readers."
9. "Choice of tense also affects voice and distance."
10. "Word choice and levels of formality can also affect the sense of voice."
11. Delivery: "It's also important to pay attention to the details of delivery, our punctuation, usage, and layout, so that our ideas can be more easily understood and accepted."
12. Punctuation: "punctuation becomes as much as an art form as painting or drawing."
13. Punctuation: "We need to know the rules so well that we understand when it is appropriate, for our purposes, to break those rules."
14. "Usage has to do with how we actually use the language, our choice of appropriate words."
15. Layout: "A good page layout is a type of persuasion in and of itself."

I believe these are excellent points that all writing can be based upon. I placed it into a context of Creative Writing as that is what I am more interested in, but I can see how all of these previous points can be placed into essays, term papers, research papers, formal letters, fictions, non-fictions, etc.

We are each different from one another. Even identical twins are different. Their personalities are not cloned. We each have a different view on the world even if we are looking at the same thing. The things we can learn from each other if we were to have a book named after each of us in which our every thought, action, event, and experience were recorded and we could read about it. There wouldn't be a library big enough to hold it all. Everyone, once in awhile, writes something in order to present themselves or their ideas. A letter of recommendation. An advertisement. A resume. A novel. An informative book. A pamphlet. There are so many things we write.

John Jakes has said, "Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish." This creates something that is yours and no one else's. It will be a part of you.

Depending on who the audience is we use the rules set for us and bend them into our own form. Perhaps naturally, and then with added tweaking. We have a purpose for writing. If something is recorded it is because we find it is something to take note of. Whether it is for ourselves or for someone else.

It is my impression, that any writer of any sort, in order to seem real and be truly heard through life, needs to intimately know what it is he or she plans on writing on. Whether a skill, a object, a person, a place, or an idea. You must capture the essence of it into written word and to do that you must know it. There are many ways of discovering something. To take from my history class, you can use primary sources, secondary sources, or a general overview of the topic. Primary sources I would include experiencing it yourself. Perhaps, watching and asking a person who has done it for information, but I think that might work better in the secondary sources. Then you can learn the topic from other written words or internet or some other broad source.

According to E. L. Doctorow, "Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go." When you discover what it is you plan to write about. Learn all you can about the subject. Writers must be very educated people if they are learning all they write about and write with authority.

These are the lessons I have learned and try to apply. These are the lessons and I will continue to try to improve them in myself. I don't think there is a limit on how high you can go.