You know why you're here. You have a story to tell. A good
story. The pictures in your head are vivid, the characters rich, your
life-experiences unique and particular to you. No one can see the world through
your eyes. Nobody can ever tell your story but you.
You know this, and yet... when you get it all down on paper it's
flat, the character are shallow and nobody wants to read beyond the first page.
It doesn't affect your audience in the way you know it should. And worse than
that, it's clichéd. You are bemused and anguished but slowly you begin to
understand why.
Words are not enough
Mere words are never as powerful as your memories. Stark
sentences will never be as locked into your reader's sense-of-self as your
imagination is to your psyche. So what do you do?
Discovering craft
You do the only thing that you can do – you discover there
is a craft to writing, there are techniques for evoking feelings and responses
in your audience. You discover the esoteria of foreshadowing, foretelling,subtext, and defamiliarization. You learn about structure, pace and narrative,
the importance of character, the distinction between story and plot. And
because you want to write and write well - and because you want it badly - you
start to devour all you can about these things to get what you want. You read
books, subscribe to lists, consume blogs, buy magazines. You do it for months,
maybe even years. You apply what you've learned at your critique group, you
re-write your work in the context of all the new techniques you now understand.
Improved writing?
And your writing becomes tight and well-paced, the
characters have depth, you have dramatic-irony and realistic dialogue. You
sound like a writer. You feel like a writer. You have all that. You have all
that but your writing is still shit. Why?
Craft is the means not the end
Because craft is just craft. It's easy to attach too much
importance to it because it is known and can be learned. That's why there is so
much material produced about it. That is why you can find so much information
on the craft of writing on the internet. It's deceptively reassuring. It's very
seductive – the idea that if you learn all these things and adopt them, you
will become a good writer.
But it's nonsense. Story-telling craft is just the language
of story-telling – it's not the actual story itself. It's not the ideas, the
characters, the content, the romance, milieu or the plot. Those are the things
that make your story great, that make it different to everybody else's. Those
are the things that make it your story.
Free yourself
You must learn the craft by all means – in the same way you
must learn to walk, to read, to write. But it's only the first step. Don't fall
into the trap that craft is all there is to writing. Learn it, master it, then
be free of it – because if all you do is focus on it, the best you can ever
hope for is to be the same as everybody else.
And that's not why you're here.
