So, you want to be a really good writer, don't you?
We’re all writers, aren’t we?
In a very basic sense, we are.
Technically, if you have even a rudimentary, but decent, education, you can put thoughts on paper (or a monitor screen) that seem attractive to you (building an audience for your work is an entirely different matter).
However, there’s a great distance separating “routine” writing from original writing; the former is anything that presents topics in a mechanistic explanatory fashion as in, say, a technical manual or other works of step-by-step instruction. Original writing, on the other hand, emerges directly from deep consciousness, aiming to explain subjects we identify as “worthwhile” and “intellectual.” Both words, though, are notoriously difficult to define and thus we’ll leave them up to an individual’s opinion. Still, “worthwhile” and “intellectual” we always associate with what we identify as good writing that consistently attracts readers.
In my early days as a “writer” I struggled and struggled with even the basics of good prose. Greek (my mother tongue) is an enormous treasure trove that has influenced deeply the romance languages derived from Latin (used today by at least one billion people around the world). Greek literature reaches into the deep ancient past and learning Ancient Greek is a unique source of training one’s mind in the Art of the Word. (In the olden days, Ancient Greek was a key part of the Greek secondary education curriculum, but left-wing “progressives,” in their usual ugly bulldozer fashion, removed it in the interest of a stupid and diseased “modernity”).
Those early struggles produced two basic lessons: You cannot put any number of decent words together unless you learn how to be a regular reader of everything you can lay your hands on; and you need to realize that practice makes perfect (or close to that).
In addition, if you’re honest about your writing, you need to be the severest critic of your own work. From time to time, most of us fall into the trap of inflated-self approval and sensationalism, reading “successful recipes” in our writing that simply do not exist—and that’s a trap you’ve got to learn how to avoid.
To date, I must have read a million essays, commentaries, and “how-to guides” to better writing. Most, if not all, of them put the emphasis on the usual re. consistency, ample vocabulary, “writing from essence” (i.e., by observing oneself in real time all the time without judging what you ‘see’) and keeping up with one’s reading.
My own footnote to all of this is that a “true” writer needs to learn how to be his/her own work most observant critic. That’s a tough one to learn and manage and it takes a serious degree of education and honest self-awareness to implement — and its very heart rests upon treating “satisfaction” about your “perfect” latest essay with a pinch of salt. The best way of learning how to do this is to put your finished work aside and allow it to quietly “age” for a few hours (or even days) at the least.
My experience with this method of “storing” text, to age it a bit like wine, came when I worked as a political/military “assistant” (read: analyst), a job that hinged on stifling emergency demands.
Real-time developing events allow next to no time for reflection, but require a level of sophistication that comes out of exactly this capability to look deeper into the essence of events.
My emergency trick to resolve this demand was (a) constantly monitoring ongoing developments (b) choosing several hot key topics to read, digest, and research, and (c) writing “analytical” pieces at my leisure to set aside, and reopen when the boss would go on hyper-drive, because the balloon had gone up, and demanded answers that should have been ready “yesterday.”
From a technical point of view, there are many types of writing, yet the core rules of building a successful piece, irrespective of subject, is training yourself to elemental requirements, which are both mechanical AND intellectual. As Zadie Smith once put it, “When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.”
Simple fact that makes one big difference.