“So, how did you become a writer?” That’s the question most people asked when they learned I am a journalist.
It was a long, long time ago. If I remember it right, I was still in high school when I discovered my knack for writing. Well, everyone can write but writing well is another matter. Every time our teacher would gave us something to write about for our formal theme note book, I usually wrote subjects that which were very unusual.
My classmates would point out that my writings were wrong because they were very dissimilar to the example our teacher had given us. My biggest break at that point in time was when the same teacher asked me to write an essay that would be submitted to a regional essay writing contest. At first, I protested. “I am still a junior,” I scrupled, “and I am sure there are some good contenders from the senior year.”
But my teacher was adamant. After too much coaxing, I fi nally relented. Although I lost in the contest (my very first!), it paved way for my desire to write and hone my writing skills. So, you want to be a writer? “Writers are most fortunate of all in not having to retire when they grow older.
Like actors, they may have a big public, but the public does not care how writers look. The thoughts of 60 or 70 are not absurd or pitiable as faces of the same age may be when revealed to a great public.
If you embrace the writing profession, it is as a close and long embrace. It lasts for life and may be as vital at the end of life as it was in the first young approach,” observes best-selling American author Margaret C. Banning.
A reporter, trying to track down the wellspring of the creative process, asked novelist and playwright Edna Ferber why she writes. Her reply was once startling and satisfying: “Because it is less agonizing to write than not to write.”
“The only important thing a writer needs is a subject,” American theatre critic Brooks Atkinson revealed. “What the reader hungers after is not accomplished craftsmanship nor even correct grammar but a frank report of the things a writer has done, seen, and thought.
None of these can be learned in the library or classroom. They have to be learned in the unsheltered world of living where me get slivers of the truth beaten into their heads.”
“Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it, and above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light,” advised Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian American Jewish newspaper publisher of the “St. Louis Post Dispatch” and the “New York World.”
American historian and author Barbara W. Tuchman has the same recommendation: “No writing comes alive unless the writer sees across his desk a reader, and searches constantly for the word or phrase which will carry the image he wants the reader to see, and arouse the emotion he wants him to feel.
Without consciousness of a live reader, what a man writes will die on his page.” To pursue a career in writing, you must write daily and rewriting what you have written. Margery Allingham, an English crime writer best remembered for her detective stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion, admitted that she writes every paragraph four times.
When asked why, she explained: “Once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I have only just thought of it.” One of the hardest parts of being a writer is writing those thoughts in a manner that could be understood by readers. “It takes real effort,” Frank E. McElroy said. “Do your writing in four bite-size portions.
Doing one of these at a time makes your writing easier and your results more effective.”
The four steps are as follows: (1) Define your purpose and learn your subject; (2) Organize your material in the light of your readers’ abilities and interests; (3) Write to best express yourself (and your ideas); and (4) Edit and polish your writing so that it is easy to read, is easy to understand, and is good English.
“A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare,” American author and poet Henry David Thoreau said.
“For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfi ed with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.”
Aside from daily writing, you must also read. “Read, read, read,” urges Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner.
“Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”
When I started writing, I had share of failures. In fact, most of those I wrote were rejected. But then, I was not alone. Many novice writers have their writing careers abruptly ended by the rejection slip. They take the rejection personally, get discouraged and give up.
But there are those who persevered. Stephen King, before he became a best-selling author, admitted that he hammered a nail into the wall when he was younger, and kept all his rejection slips there, until he reached 100.
In his wonderful “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,” he wrote: “When you get to 100, give yourself a pat on the back… You’ve arrived.” Award-winning F. Scott Fitzgerald had the same experience. By July 1919, he accumulated 122 rejections slips, which he pinned in his room. It was not until his novel, “This Side of Paradise,” was published that his short started appearing in magazines.
Ernest Hemingway was one of those who collected rejection slips scattered on his road to literary fame. Unable to sell any stories he wrote in summer and fall in 1919, he asked Edwin Balmer, a former reporter for the “Chicago Tribune,” for advice. “The writing business is a funny business and you’ll never know when something will sell,” Balmer said. “Rejected stories did not stay rejected forever.”
So, you want to become a writer. Let me warn you though. “Writing is a lonely profession,” declares publisher E.W. Martin. “It always has been; it always must be. The author may be a philosopher, poet, historian, biographer, essayist, or novelist, but his ideas, his vision, have to be communicated in loneliness.
Only by a dredging of his own consciousness can he get at the kind of power with which to remake an experience or to reformulate a concept and shed light that has not been shed before on conditions, ideas, and situations.”
