I believe I am reaching a sort of ‘writer’s puberty’. Lately has been a whirlwind of emotions, loosing and gaining faith n my abilities, wanting to change my style entirely, being unable to pick up a pen, being convinced it’s my only option.
Now, I could attribute this to my recent foray into the tangled fields of ‘how to write’ books.
It’s a bad genre to say the least, filled with books full of nothing at all, but I’ve made a few wise and not so wise choices – Stephen King’s “On Writing”, and another author’s book, “Reading Like A Writer”.
The latter, though educational, is also filled with the high-and-mighty superiority of your stereotypical Oxford graduate in English literature, the doting love of the classics and, frustratingly, a tendency to focus on writing at it’s most complex and tangled instead of readable, enjoyable work. Now, I love the critical genius of these type of people, but there are few things more off-putting than reading spiels about work that you need to re-read to even begin to understand, to hear about the beauty of sentances, and to have to listen to the words of someone who seems to feel so much more about writing that you do.
I dislike the types of people who think they’re better than every other reader because they’ve been through ‘War and Peace’ five times and have twice the vocabularly you will ever have, because I believe art is something to be enjoyed, not to be toiled over… but that camp is split into two halfs, with writers who follow my free-flowing mind-set, and others who believe every word should take an hour’s thought beforehand.
Reading this is opening my eyes to the true complexity of the written word… a complexity that will take me a lot of years to fully understand and love. It’s making me think abut what I write, about the meaning, and the significance, the style… and all of that is wonderful.
But it also makes me hate my work, for not being able to make it feel ‘beautiful’ to me. Once I was a storyteller, and to an extent I still am… but I’m trying to become more than that, a writer, and it’s hard. I think it will always be hard – after all, it’s a field filled with self-doubt, rejection and criticism – but now I’m beginning to realise just how much deeper than that it all goes.
So I’m growing up, as a writer, and immersing myself in writing as skilled craftmanship and art instead of well-written, enjoyable entertainment. It’s hard… hell, it’s terrifying, and I know that as soon as I ‘mature’ I’ll never be able to see writing the same way again.
But it’s progress, in the same way every book I’ve written before and every book I shall write afterwards is progress, and one fact still remains unchanged – with every word written, every chapter finished, every lesson learned, I’m getting better.
Writing, and any kind of art, is not about perfection from the get-go. It’s about learning, and improving, until the end of your days.
So here we go.