Writing Tip

Writing is an exploration. You start

from nothing and learn as you go.

E.L. Doctorow, American Author

         

How often have we sat staring at a blank page, or a blank screen, feeling the pressure to write or somehow under external pressure to meet a deadline, and the inspiration will not come. We invoke the Muse, we try to conjure an image but the block remains. We know we are not alone. Many before us have trod this lonely path. Remembering that we start from a wellspring of memory, experience, imagination, the first words appear on the page. After the first baby steps another sentence appears. What’s holding me back? I know what I want to say. How to find the words, put them in the proper order? If we care about our craft, we want these words to express who we are. Someone else will read them. That’s it, everyone fears being judged. When a writer presses forward in the face of the obstacles of self-doubt and concern for how her efforts will be received, she will permit the inner voice to let the words flow.

E. L. Doctorow gives us another insight: “Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.” 

Authors, poets, essayists take heart. Once we have stepped out into the void and found we did not plummet into the abyss, our courage has been strengthened, our resolve becomes firmer. Even criticism pushes us forward. Praise and appreciation becomes the fertilizer in the garden of  our creativity.

Lastly, From Mark Twain: “Courage is not the absence of fear, or resistance to fear. It is the mastery of fear.”

Eine kleine Philosophie

“To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity and creative strength.” Lawrence Clark Powell, noted author, literary critic, bibliographer and librarian at UCLA for many years. (born 1906-died 2001).

We all have these qualities to one degree or another. The secret is to tap into the well-spring of inspiration present at some level in everyone’s heart. Any experience can be a writing prompt. In a recent writing workshop, a professor of English and creative writing suggested that a writer be conscious of our literary forbears. The title of the workshop was “Writing with Allusion, (i.e. an indirect reference to something), Beg, Borrow or Steal,” It is no sin to use ideas or methods employed by those who have trod the path of creativity in the past. He showed how all writers do it to some extent or another. When we use a name or reference a character from mythology or Scripture, we are using the literary device of allusion. He gave this as an example of “begging” from the wellspring of recognizable words that embody a concept which is succinct and universally understood.

Whether we are aware of it or not, there are a finite number of plot concepts that recur throughout literature. Writers “borrow” these ideas and incorporate them into their works of fiction. Going as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh, written thousands of years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, writers have built on the plot line of a heroic figure surviving against insuperable odds.

           

The word “steal” would tend to give us pause. The word implies flagrant plagiarism. Plagiarism, however, as everyone knows, is the wholesale copying verbatim from another’s work and claiming it as our own. When the professor demonstrated what he meant, he used fragments of poetry and asked the class to employ the same meter and pattern but change the words. Although he gave the prompts as an exercise in poetry, he made the point that this method may apply to all forms of writing. The professor cited T. S. Eliot who copied shamelessly from other poets in composing the “Wasteland” and created a timeless piece of literature.

Finally, to quote Isaac Newton: “If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.”

 Comments welcome