Every New Year’s, thousands of aspiring business and self-help authors resolve to make this the year they get their book done. I’ve heard that 80 percent of people want to write a book-that’s a lot of people. But even if that figure is wrong, and, say, 40 percent of people have the goal of writing a [...]
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What I am going to tell you here will be obvious to some readers, but to others, perhaps not. There are two objectives that any piece of writing has, only two, and this is true for either fiction or non-fiction. All writing exists either to: 1. Educate (self or others); and/or, 2. Entertain (self or others). That’s it. That is the bottom line. You can think about any piece of writing from the cave paintings in Lascaux France to the operators manual for the Superconducting Supercollider, and they were all written to educate or entertain. My view is that if the writing does both then it is better. So what has this got to do with keeping the end in mind? What I mean is, have a clear objective when you start writing something, whether that objective is written down or just in your mind. A clear objective, a destination, saves time and makes your writing better. Let me give you an example from my own work. Continue reading Writing 101: Start With the End in Mind (Write to Educate, Entertain, or Preferably Both) Hemingway had a small apartment in Paris that he used as a writing studio. That fact alone makes it a challenge to feel sorry for him when reading A Moveable Feast, particularly since most struggling writers are making do with the small corner of a cramped room in a tract house somewhere. Poor Ernest! It’s no wonder he had to abandon his studio for long periods of time to visit Deux Magots. Of course, Hemingway also wrote at the cafes in Paris, but we have no real modern equivalent in the United States, only poor approximations. While it remains a romantic notion to slave away at the Great American Novel with a steaming cup of java in front of you, the truth is that most coffee shops are too loud and rife with interruption to get any real work done. Writing is not a spectator sport for most of us; we need solitude. Here then, are a few ideas to get you pointed in the right direction: Continue reading The Importance of Sanctuary: Finding a Place to Write |
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