Food for aspiring Writers

                   “Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life,  they inform and shape life”.

We might have a cluster of different reasons why we write. For some it might be for leisure or fun, for another it might be a window or a gateway from the tyranny of darkness to light, for self-exploration, or as a form of expressing things we cannot express verbally, or you just simply love writing. There is an explosion of writing tips to aspiring writers and here are some of them which

 I have dug that are essentially helpful to me. The list isn’t exhaustive. If you are an aspiring writer here’s a treat for you:  

 1. Read as much as possible. Do not just read during your leisure. Keep reading in your daily schedule. This is the best and undeniable way to learn how to write.  Read outside of your comfort zone. Confining yourself to one genre will limit your style of writing.

 2. Pay attention to the world; to life. What you see and experience in life will be acted out by the characters in your writing.

                

                                    “Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry”- Muriel Rukeyser.

3. Make a list of ideas and potential titles for stories, or even a word you come across. Sit down to write a long prose-poem-essay on it.

4. Do not set your mind on being published. The act of writing itself is its own reward.

5. Do not try to be perfectionists in writing. Perfectionism kills creativity. Just keep on writing.

6. When people talk listen completely and don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Observe intently. You should be able to write not just you saw and heard but also what you felt if what you observe and heard gave you any feeling.

                                           “Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and                                                                   shape life”- E.B White.

     7.  Learn to be reverent. Think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. Pay attention and this can get into a kind of openness to the world and you will see in everything that there is an essence to learning.

      8. Be brave enough to let your emotions fill the pages of your notes. What you felt and thought itself will by itself invent a new style so that when people read and talk about your style they are always a little astonished in the newness of it. Your attempt to express a new idea with such force will have the originality of the thought. Do not be ashamed to feel a little too much.

      9. I quote Susan Orlean, “You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.”

     10.  Channel your sufferings and hardships in life into your writing. It will cut deep.

                           “Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie”

                                                                       - Stephen King.

    11. Do not always resort to lengthy sentences. Say what you mean in a more efficient and reader-friendly way. Pity them cos’ they have a tough job to do; to identify thousands of little marks on the pages and make sense of it. Do not bore the readers by beating about the bush a point. Find yourself being direct as often as possible. Being simple will cater more to the needs of the readers. Masters of language like Shakespeare resorted to sentences like ‘to be or not to be?’ in his work Hamlet. 

      The longest word is a three letters word.

     12. If you have to establish yourself as a writer you have to write whether you’re inspired or not. 

           Do not always wait for inspirations.

     13.  Read your work aloud. Your ears should be in harmony with your mind. 

     14. Keeping a diary also helps in writing. It develops in the writer naturalness and spontaneity.

       

       

                                                  Write your heart out.

     

       Complement this article by reading Advice to writers by Jon Winokur, H.P. Lovecraft's Advice to aspiring writers, Ernest Hemingway's Advice to Aspiring Authors.