Writing and Speaking > Writing > The True Writer
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Article rating : 0.00, 0 votes. Author : Ieuan Dolby
I love writing! Give me a pad and a pencil and I will write anything. Only yesterday I wrote an amazingly lengthy dialogue that just sprung out of me like those little springs one finds in biros when taken apart for no reason at all.
My brilliant script arose from a situation that required me to clarify certain deeds that I had just enacted. Oh, nothing major or disastrous like informing my wife that I had just run over her cat or that I had just emerged from a marathon orgy with the Robinsons and Spencer’s down the road! I just had to tell a mate that I had borrowed some videos from him without his direct permission but that I would return them once viewed, probably the very next day. It sounds simple enough when read right here and right now but what came out of me that day was an unstoppable piece of drift wood on the flood tide.
Unfortunately, I was drunk at the time and my mate could not understand anything that I had written. In fact he first asked me what language it was and then when finding out that it was supposedly the Queens English suggested that I seek immediate help
This occurrence is by no means a struggling writer’s scream to the heavens and certainly not the result of a weird group of aliens using me to communicate with some peculiar earthlings. It is in fact the normal action of any good writer, to put down in print exactly and precisely what is in his brain at that precise spot in time. Whether the writer is pissed, bored or high on life the ability to write these feelings without biased opinions on the correct manner that it should be presented in is a skill that very few practice. My ‘gobbldeekoog’ the other day was and is a very skillful piece of literature that encapsulated not only my current state of mind but it also placed in print all that I wanted to say on the matter. The fact that nobody else could understand anything that I had written, including myself when I reread it the other day, is by the by!
There are a few works that have evaded the critics and managed to become recognized books. The works of Solzhenitsyn for one are mind numbingly boring yet they have managed to become internationally recognized and are now placed under the heading of literature. Moby Dick for another is an exceptionally tangled weave of irrelevance that stretches on for pages, the author most likely having written whilst waiting for a delayed British Rail train! A few hysterical novels and non-fictional books have managed to reach the shelves, giving rise to the fact that people under the influence of alcohol can actually be read!
There is also another group of people who have successfully evaded the sensors and who can write whatever is in their minds, whenever they feel like it and have it published to boot. These are the geeks and the fanatics.
To prove my point pick up a magazine that you have no interest in at all and try to read and understand the first page! To the avid gardener an article on a crankshaft nodal stresses and how they affect the vibrations in an over sped engine is as understandable as my previously mentioned note to my friend. The patchwork quilt fanatic would equally find a story written in star trek ‘speak’ as interesting as watching a kettle boil. In fact the other day my wife asked me to help her translate a university thesis on ‘Organizational Behavior in the Work Place and to say the least I could not get past the title, much to her consternation.
Apart from the few mentioned above who have snuck in the back corner with their little understood works it is a common statement that writers need to write about what they know or love to get published. The value of insider knowledge is immense and to combine this with well written prose is a near guarantee to a two figure income. But to write just whatever is in the head, whatever comes out without reference to a dictionary and without knowledge or support is well, not readily accepted. For example, should the avid plumber embark on an article on mounting climbing in Fiji whilst having never stepped foot outside of Glasgow and never having climbed a mountain, the end result would not be appealing to the end clientele. Equally so an article on banking principles in Singapore, written by a hermit living at the top of Ben Nevis would not quite ring true. But in all cases these articles might contain more feelings and truth, more direct writings as only a true writer can give - thoughts on paper, without referenced material, without inside knowledge and certainly not written with the end reader in mind.
It is therefore the average reader who blocks many budding writers from getting noticed. The thirst quotient, the quest for knowledge from articles is abundant. Readers require feed from whatever they read; articles must provide new knowledge or information or they must portray a different approach on an already documented subject. In other words articles, books and prose must all be one better than anything previous; they must have additions or further advice!
This is where it has all fallen down. It is no longer a writer’s ability to write excellent works that makes him successful but the fact that he/she has knowledge that people need or that only he/she has (and of course a mediocre ability to pen to paper). Meanwhile in the background and remaining very much unnoticed is a horde of potential writers who write just whatever they want to write about and in whom the world has no interest in whatsoever.
Author and Webmaster of Seamania. As a Chief Engineer in the Merchant Navy he has sailed the world for fifteen years. Now living in Taiwan he writes about cultures across the globe and life as he sees it.
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