Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Thoughts On Writing

These are not hard and fast rules. These are just ideas you could use, if you felt so inclined.
  1. One way to express yourself is to forget about expressing "yourself" and start expressing things. Consciously putting yourself into your writing is a niche skill for ironic comedians or people writing autobiographies. If you want the "real you" to come through, focus on making the most objective expression you can of things outside of yourself. If you're describing a fictional character, describe them as though writing an objective expression of a real person. Your personality (the thing you want to express so badly) will come through from writing this way.
  2. When a comic book artist draws a brick wall, they sometimes forego drawing every brick in favor of drawing a cluster of bricks here and there. Looking at the picture, you get the impression that the entire wall is made of bricks. This is a useful method for descriptive writing. You needn't list every detail. Just describe the most salient aspects of the thing, and the reader's mind will complete the picture. If I tell you that I'm in an old library, and that there's a person sitting at an antique wooden desk in that library behind a pile of dusty books, then what does that person look like? In all likelihood, you've already decided that the desk has carven claw feet and that the person behind it is either a wizardly old man or an old lady who looks like a Victorian schoolteacher.
  3. The surest way to screw up when you're making art is to do whatever you think people expect you to do, rather than making work that reflects what's going through your head on a day-to-day basis.

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