Do you think you can write?
Today I finished a documentary on Joan Didion. I have always been curious about writing, the process, the behind the scenes of it all. For me, the end product i.e the finished manuscript, the published book or collection of essays or poems is often anticlimactic. I find in most cases that the pleasure of writing disappears the moment I start reading what I have written. This is because once a story gets to the end, that is it; the end. What happens after?
Something that caught my attention in that documentary was the fact that Joan wraps unfinished works that she is stumped with inside a polythene bag and leaves them in her freezer. Talk about freezing words and thought processes. That is the kind of unique viewpoint I seek in the writing process. I feel like that little boy who heard with awe about reading with feet in a basin of cold water to avoid sleeping from students of higher institutions. Funny enough, I never tried that dollop of native wisdom during my university days.
The genius of writing lies in four principles; observation, memory, imagination, story telling. Many writing books focus on the story telling aspect of writing because it is considered the more difficult aspect to deal with. After all, grammar or the usage of it has been an argument among writers for as long as the art form has existed. It is why we have theories by Masters of the form. I have never really paid it much mind because despite its supposed difficulty in learning, it can be easily learnt through study and practice. The rest on the other hand are not so simple.
Take, for example, observation. To observe is to take note of things. You don't just hear, you listen. You don't just breathe, you perceive. You just don't look, you see. A lot of persons go through life without fully applying their senses to the world around them or inside them. They spend so much time worrying about one problem or the other, their heads bowed that they rarely notice the motion, the pulse, the heat, the sound around them.
As a writer, observation is a key component of the process. The writer does not write in a vacuum. Even science fiction and fantasy stories have as their framework reality. Human experiences; love, war, anger, grief, joy can be found therein. Social constructs; poverty, power, inequality, corruption, etc can be found in these books no matter how speculative they may be. The writer must therefore utilize all their senses in order to fully grasp not only actions and inactions but also motivations and the psychology behind making choices. It is this sort of observational power that creates fully rounded and well developed characters as well as settings that are as vivid as a photograph. You can consider this to be research but the truth is a writer is always researching even of they do not know what they are looking for.
Without memory, the process of observation is wasted. A writer needs to be able to have information at their fingertips. Every noted observation and or research must be kept close either in the brain or, as the brain is not always a reliable witness, in external saving devices e.g. text, video and audio aids. In this way, a writer can utilize to the maximum capacity the fruits of their observations and research. The Gulag Archipelago is a novel filled with data from the Nazi rule in Europe. This data gives the work an authenticity that a disclaimer cannot give. You feel the sense that this did happen and the characters are real people who breathed here on this our earth and died. The author observed, research and saved data in order to give us such a piece of art.
The third principle is imagination. I believe that there is no great writer who does not have a vivid imagination. Imagination is the fuel that moves the bulky sentences, syntax, semantics, morphemes and phonemes into something beautiful and filling. It is imagination that turns the ordinary into extraordinary. A writer turns a shoe into a house with a lady and her children. A matchstick becomes a door into another existence. A wardrobe turns kids into queens and kings. Without imagination, the beauty of this world will go unnoticed and unappreciated.
A writer utilizes this gift, because you can't learn it, in creating their stories. They embellish, they lie, they bend the truth, they exaggerated and they tantalize. A well written work will take the reader to a new place, somewhere familiar but absurdly strange, a world so like home but based on utterly different rules. Fantasy and science fiction writers have taken this further than most in the development of their setting, customs, character traits but drama has gone the deepest. Take the character of Heathcliff from Withering Heights for example. His dark passion is so strong it is almost unreal. Many readers may never meet such passion in real life but those kind of people exists. It takes observation and imagination to create such a strong personality that is so vivid.
When you combine these three principles together and you can tell a story from start to finish, then you know that you are a writer. A masters program and all that will only fine-tune what you have within. At the end, it may make you into a writer that you do not like. I say this because it is easy for teachers to push thier perspectives on their students. That raw talent will be modified into something sophisticated but you may lose something along the way; an unbiased viewpoint, a certain focus for your literary ambitions, a style.
If you can observe well, record your observations, utilize an imaginative and unfettered mind, and record your story without making too much grammatical errors, you should do well as a writer. I write this as an unpublished novice but I believe that this is as simple as knowing if you should write can get. Good morning.
Thank you @fendit