A facebook friend of mine who is an aspiring writer posted this on facebook:
________ is annoyed, on a Friday night.
A quote from a well-known(ish) young writer, on a writer’s blog:
“One of the reasons writing is so hard is that there’s just so much to think about with every sentence. Every sentence is supposed to be stylistically interesting, and it’s telling the story, and it’s characterizing the people who are in the story, and it’s in the voice of the person telling the story… There’s just a lot of things you have to get right in every sentence for it to work. Having to think consciously about all of those things is the reason you spend so many hours staring at a blank page.”
My unwelcome advice:
Lord. Forget it. Become a dogsitter. Anyone who worries this much about it is probably not going to be able to continue to write naturally for long. You are young now, but…erm… It has to be about wanting to express yourself, I feel. Anyway, think about selling real estate.
It’s part of the game. Always has been. Always will be.
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Bearing in mind that facebook is probably the best place to give unwanted (and bad) advice, because if you can’t give unwanted (and bad) advice on facebook, then where can you give it?, I must say that I totally agree with the original poster and not with my facebook friend.
Of course, you have to think about those things with every sentence. There have been, throughout the history of literature, a gifted few who could just let the words fly and the story would get told, people who probably had the gift of gab even when they were not sitting in silence and trying to communicate their thoughts via paper and ink. I suspect Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac were in this category, perhaps James Joyce because a natural talent for bullshit is an Irish thing, and maybe Tom Robbins, I don’t know.
I know I have to work at my writing. Even though I’m focused on poetry, and now on blogging, I try to get every sentence right, I try to keep the language appropriate to the theme, I try to keep the sentences the right length and the ideas within them in coherent order.
You can’t just sit and write page after page of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” and expect the juices to start flowing at some point, you can’t just turn your brain off and expect that your inner genius will pop out of your fingertips.
That leads to shit writing and the world has far too much shit writing as it is.
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