Teachers of serious writing will often tell you… or more correctly, give you the Word of God, “You want to be a good writer? You have to write every single day.” And having been a teacher of writing at the high school and middle school level, I am committed to passing that on to you also as the inviolable Word of God. You see, I have long been, well, not a serious writer exactly, more of a dedicated writer with warped notions of reality and a tendency towards goofiness. You can see by the view of my WordPress insights page that I have steadily, in five years’ time, been noticed and looked at by increasing amounts of thoroughly duped WordPress viewers.
10,373 visitors have viewed something on my blog 17,383 times in 2017. And I know that most are looking at the pictures and moving on. That’s how I get away with writing some of the stupid stuff I post on my blog. But there’s a secret to that too. I drew or painted a lot of the pictures I use on this blog myself. You would think that sooner or later some expert psychologist would trace violence in the streets back to my pictures as the ultimate cause, but that hasn’t happened yet. I am sure that is mostly because not even the psychologists can muck their way through my paragraphs of purple paisley prose. You see, I most often use my writing on this blog to commit atrocities of humor and wit. I only rarely dabble in things intended to be uplifting, spiritual, politically challenging, or sentimental. I complain on my blog a lot. It is also a place for expressing my inherent grumpiness and old-man dyspeptic irritations with life. But viewers tend to take my humor seriously and only laugh at the stuff I am most embarrassed about.
I was supposed to be doing this blog as way to promote my book, Catch a Falling Star, for I-Universe Publishing. They set it up for me. But, as they don’t pay me anything for the work I put into it, and it doesn’t really impact sales anyway, I use it now as writing practice. I have as a personal goal to write 500 words a day. The blog counts. So it means that some days, the 500 words I write in my blog are the only words I get written that day. Though, now that I am retired, 500 words of blog writing plus 500 words of novel writing can get me well past writing 1000 words in a day. It doesn’t take long at that rate to build up an awful lot of words. I shudder to think what would happen if the word dam were to suddenly give way, releasing a word-flood of monumental proportions. Half of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex would drown in Mickian words if that were to happen.
So, do I think that you should write every day? Do I think it makes you a better writer? Do I actually follow my own advice? Yes! To all three. And as I have passed the 500 word mark yet again, I can stop now.
Reading Other Writers
Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else. It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own. You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.
And not every other writer is Robert Frost. Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s Gene Kelly. There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding. What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease? And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter? Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”? I think it is. Trolls are not smart.
I know people have to make an effort to understand me. When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head. In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it. See what I did there? It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense. That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures. If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire. I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues. But most people don’t. Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point. For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom? For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom? Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub. I know. I tried to stuff her in there for this picture. And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?
When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things. I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well. I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better. And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words. I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Thank God for that! And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot. And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value. It is always worth doing.
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Tagged as reading for writing, writing advice