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The world’s giant cache of “writings” can be divided into infinite categories. You’ve got prose and poetry. Each of them can be further divided into fiction and non-fiction. Then there are stories, essays, sonnets, limericks, epics, novels. The list of distinctions that can be made from one writing to another goes on and on. Whatever category you put pen to paper to fill, there are two ways of writing:
1) Writing done only for yourself
2) Writing done for others.
Writing for yourself is unquestionably valuable to emotional health and to problem solving and more. So is writing for others. To be sure, all writing for others is writing for yourself and can have many of the same personal benefits. The distinction between the two resides in the intended audience. In writing for yourself, there are absolutely no rules. No one else need see it - or understand it if they do. You yourself needn’t understand what you’ve written in order for the writing to have value.
However, if you've written something only for yourself, without making any effort to make it accessible to others, then sharing that writing in public is pointless. In fact, asking the public to read something you’ve written without keeping the audience in mind can even feel to the reader like an act of aggression. In theater and also in dance, people refer to work done only for the artist, without thought to the audience as "masturbation". In other words, it feels good to the artist, and may even be healthy, but there's nothing in it for anyone else. Don't do it in public.
Just as there are no rules to govern how or what you write for yourself, there are no rules to govern writing done for others. There are, however, important guidelines. Spelling is one of those guidelines; grammar is another. If spelling and grammar are off for no apparent reason (i.e. if the errors contribute materially to a tone, or are part of quotation), then the reader is torn out of the experience the author intended by those errors. It makes the author seem lazy. The reader is inclined to think, "If the author isn't going to spend the time to polish this, then why should I spend the time to read it?"
From here, we move into trickier guidelines that loosely govern writing for others. One of these tricky devils is word choice. Every word in every language has at least two kinds of meaning. There is denotation – which is the dictionary definition of a word – and there is connotation – which is all the subtle stuff that a word calls to mind when a person hears or reads it. For example, “slap” and “spank” have very similar definitions in the dictionary. However, most people would agree that to slap a child is wrong, but spanking may sometimes be called for. When writing for others, it is important to keep in mind both the denotation and the connotation of the words you choose. Further, you must pay attention to what those words mean to other people. For instance, if you want readers to have sympathy for a character you’ve created, even if “slap” has a positive connotation in your mind, you should not have that character “slapping” a child – the great majority of your readers feel “slap” has a bad connotation.
Metaphors bring up another tricky spot in the guidelines shaping how to write for others. Metaphor – the use of one idea to represent another, unrelated but comparable idea. Metaphors are kites. I lost you; I know. Furthermore, metaphors can be very abstract. Abstraction is good. It leads to deeper levels of understanding, but the meaning of abstraction isn’t inherently clear. You see, in order for a metaphor or any abstraction to work (to evoke a compelling idea in the mind of the reader) it must have a frame of reference. A metaphor is a kite; without something to hold it down, it is lost [on the reader].
The anchor for metaphor is concrete image. Without some concrete details to use as handles for your metaphor it will fly away, never having been grasped by the readers you wished to affect. A good anchor lets the reader say, "Ah, I know the feeling." It lets the reader truly appreciate the artistry of a metaphor. Every bit of literature is an onion. It will keep a long time on a shelf in the dark, but it nourishes if you take it out and eat it.
There are many of these tricky guidelines, far too many to fit into what I intend to be a short essay, but there is one more that needs a good look. The content of a piece meant for sharing must have in it something for the reader. Generally, a reader is looking for something in everything she reads to apply to her own life. We read, and compare our own lives to those of characters in a story, or to elements of an essay, looking for morsels that resonate with our own lives. Sometimes, if a writer gets too wrapped up in themselves or in their characters, that search is too hard for the reader. “My life is so hard,” is difficult for a reader to stomach. So is, “My life is so great.” But these are thoughts we as writers want to share – the question becomes how to share without alienating readers, without being “masturbatory”. As with metaphors, these thoughts need handles. The handles for personal emotions that allow readers to become involved and interested rather than pushed away, though it may seem counterintuitive, are details:
“My life is so hard. I’m very sad all the time. Everyone in my life has let me down” Or: “This morning, I found it difficult to get out of bed. There’s nothing wrong with my body, and no one had tied me down. I just couldn’t convince myself that there was anything more interesting in the world outside than my white, featureless ceiling.”
Which do you find more compelling? I’m guessing it’s the second version. Sure, the first one is more efficient (in a way). You know a bit about why my life is hard, both that I’m sad and that people have let me down. Well, in the second version, you can see that I am sad. There are many more words, and you still don’t know that people have let me down, but you care. When folks read things that look like my first draft, they think, “Who cares?” So, though you may have been efficient in some ways, you’ve lost your audience. If you take your time and keep your audience, your word allowance goes way up. This thing, this inclusion of details, is the root of what critics mean when they tell writers, “Show us. Don’t tell us.”
In order for your writing to touch or even interest others, you’ve got to write for them, cater to them. It’s a hard line to walk to cater to others without pandering to them, but thankfully, there is a good technique for learning how to walk that line. Read. Read everything you can get your hands on, and if you are pulled along by something you are reading, ask yourself why. If you are turned off, or find yourself wondering who cares, if you are lost without a frame of reference – ask yourself why.
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