Any writer who uses “ain’t” and “tendentious” in the same sentence, whoquotes without using quotation marks, knows what he’s doing.
Yeah, because if they make a message obvious enough, then they don't have to use so many different marks in their work. I guess that shows experience.
The secret of his popularity—aside from his pyrotechnical use of theAmerican language—was that he was writing for himself and didn’t give a damnwhat the reader might think.
He wrote solely what he wanted, regardless of what anyone else might think. Talk about confidence.
There’s a man writing about a subject I have absolutely no interest in. Yet Ienjoy this piece thoroughly.
Different people have different tastes. I've often read stories about things I know nothing about, but the style of writing can sometimes lure people in like a flower lures in a bee.
But whatever your age, be yourself when you write.
If I weren't myself when I write, who else would I be?
You arewriting for yourself.
Simple, but very true. Whenever I'm writing a Fan-fiction, or one of my books, I try to ask myself "If I were a person looking through the library, would I be interested in reading it? And, would I want to read it again?"
The political columnist James Reston didn’t use “I” in his columns; yet I had agood idea of what kind of person he was, and I could say the same of many otheressayists and reporters. Good writers are visible just behind their words.
If he was able to deliver such a personal feeling across, even without using the first person point of view, then this writer must be amazing!
Writers are obviously at their most natural when they write in the firstperson
Yeah. That point of view is great for people, especially if you want to tell a romance story, or even an exciting adventure novel.
Paragraph 1 is a disaster—a tissue of generalities that seem to have comeout of a machine. No person could have written them. Paragraph 2 isn’t muchbetter. But Paragraph 3 begins to have a somewhat human quality, and byParagraph 4 you begin to sound like yourself.
Practice makes perfect, as they say.
This is the problem of writers who set out deliberately to garnish their prose.You lose whatever it is that makes you unique.
I agree. It's okay to want to write something exciting or even relaxing, but if you end up putting too much into one place, or try to use someone else's style, then it's no better than putting too much Parmesan on your pasta. Yuck.
But you will be impatient to find a “style”—to embellish the plain words sothat readers will recognize you as someone special.
Every author has a unique way of writing. It's only natural for them to want their writing styles to be just as unique, even if they have to be trimmed down.
“I may be wrong, but Ithink this can be deleted and the meaning won’t be affected. But you decide.Read the sentence without the bracketed material and see if it works
I guess it's his way of saying, "Even if you remove some specifications, the whole meaning may not be affected, if your writing is good enough."
By using a more pompous phrase in hisprofessional role he not only sounds more important; he blunts the painful edgeof truth.
Making something sound not-so-painful is really part of a person's caring personality. It's only natural to want to put someone at ease so they don't panic.
We head them up. We don’t faceproblems anymore. We face up to them when we can free up a few minutes. Asmall detail, you may say—not worth bothering about. It is worth botheringabout.
It's true. Procrastination can be a big problem these days.
Good writing doesn’t come naturally
Too true. No one ever starts out as a professional, they have to make mistakes and learn from them.
Perhaps a sentence has been soshoddily constructed that the reader could read it in several ways. Perhaps thewriter has switched pronouns in midsentence, or has switched tenses, so thereader loses track of who is talking or when the action took place.
I see the point. Keeping a specific pronoun consistent throughout a story or book is very vital. If you suddenly go from 'he' to 'i' then the reader can get so confused.
But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanestcomponents. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could bea short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in theverb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doingwhat—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength ofa sentence.
That's a good point. Every word that a writer uses should serve a purpose. If it's merely repeating what you've already said, then it's no different than a broken record.
Can such principles be taught? Maybe not. But most of them can be learned.
I love it! People don't just start out as experts. Instead, they grow as they go.
I then said that rewriting is the essence ofwriting. I pointed out that professional writers rewrite their sentences over andover and then rewrite what they have rewritten.
It's true. I've written things down before, and even if it seemed right at first, I just kept writing and rewriting until I found the perfect way to say something. You almost never get it right the first time, so I love how you can go back and fix your mistakes.
I’ve also incorporatedlessons I learned by continuing to wrestle with the craft myself, writing books onsubjects I hadn’t tried before: baseball and music and American history. Mypurpose is to make myself and my experience available. If readers connect withmy book it’s because they don’t think they’re hearing from an English professor.They’re hearing from a working writer.
I can understand how hard it is to incorporate certain things into your writing. I write for fun, and even then, I can't always just slip whatever I want into a story. But, I still try to use all I can in my stories. It's both educational and fun.