Storytelling

I've decided that a lot of this blog is going to be devoted to my continued adventure in the field of writing, since that's where I'm devoting a lot of my thoughts and my energy these days. I thought my first post on the subject should be about a realization that I've had recently: I'm actually a fairly mediocre fiction writer.

Before you get concerned that this is just going to be one giant digital pity party, understand that this realization is actually an incredibly hopeful and liberating one, which will probably take a little explaining to make sense of. By "writing", I specifically mean the technical aspect of the craft. The details and principles of creating powerful, moving, and refined prose. It's something that I am still largely a novice at. I've learned an awful lot about it, especially within the last few months, but every time I've sat down and tried to actually wrap some words around the scenes and characters that seem so vivid in my mind, I'm made keenly aware of how far short the result falls. It's been getting the point where I've found it difficult to make any progress at all over the last month.

But here's the encouraging part of it: the craft of writing can be learned, just like the technical aspects of a lot of other art forms. What I have always had confidence in, however, has been my passion, almost a compulsion, for telling good stories. I'll get into how important and significant I think stories are in another post, but weaving a compelling story is something that has always come rather naturally to me. I'm not saying it doesn't take a lot of work, but I always seem to be dreaming about the themes, characters, plot points, setting (etc, etc,) that combine to make a meaningful story. So while I'm aware that I have a lot to learn about the practice and technique of writing, I'm also coming to believe that the creative, intuitive part of the process -- the storytelling -- is much harder to learn to do well through effort alone.

Janelle shared some really helpful observations about my writing with me over the last week. One of the most important of them was that the weakest parts of what I write are the ones that feel as though I was trying to live up to a specific standard of what "good writing" looks like...which is exactly what I spend a lot of my time doing.

One of the (very few) downsides to having read an awful lot of really good books -- and having gone back to some of my favorites with an eye towards discovering what made them so compelling -- is that I've developed a strong personal sense of what "good writing" looks like. In that "I'm not sure I could describe it, but I'll know it when I see it" kind of way.

Which of course, means that everything I wrote could never match up. Surprise, surprise. Because while a lot of the elements of what made my favorite books so excellent were truly universal techniques and aspects of craft, an equal number were just the stylistic strengths of that particular author. Their voice, as it's often described.

I still haven't fully uncovered my voice in my writing yet, but I'm starting to find it in unexpected places. This one little shift in my perspective has single-handedly restored the sense of fun, adventure, and discovery that drew me to writing in the first place. A sense I had definitely lost after spending so much time trying to produce "good writing".

So it's an adventure again! I'll keep working on refining my command of the craft of writing, with an even clearer sense of purpose than before. But in the mean time, I'm not going to keep judging everything I create according to a standard I'll never be able to reach.

I'm just going to tell a story.