It’s more than exciting to enter, to enhance, to detract from, or to exit worlds just by assembling words. When writing, we don’t have to: purchase an airplane seat, rent a minivan, book passage on a rocket, or participate in either a social movement or a coup de force to impact multiple realms. Rather, in pieces of fiction, by merely opening ourselves to our imaginations, we can develop characters, coin dialogue, and add details to settings. As well, in pieces of nonfiction, by merely expanding our mind’s eyes, we can weigh where examples and explanations are indispensable to our claims. In this sense, writing, in the least, is stimulating!
Nonetheless, one of the trickiest bits of actualizing the adrenaline charge of writing is releasing us to our fancies, i.e. is allowing ourselves to become unbound. Regrettably, on the whole, we have believe that inflexibility is nearly always the correct route to moving forward and, correspondingly, that ingenuity should be withheld.
Given our civilization’s influence, that is, the ways in which we are formally and informally schooled, our enthusiasm for writing frequently comes under siege. Namely, our culture’s mechanization of human output thwarts our inventiveness. Early on, we learn to write for specified reading levels, to mollify advertisers, patrons, and other backers, and to adjust our yields to the audience psychographics prescribed by our publishers.
Fortunately, an antidote to this systematization is available straightaway. Principally, we can look to inspiration to liberate us from hackneyed poetics and from dull prose. More precisely, we can employ approval and we can employ inquiry to buoy us in the face of widespread, habituated deterrences to originality.
Per the former, we wordies should embrace the verity that we are spurred to write for many reasons. Despite the disparity among writers’ motives, all of us are spot-on in yearning to dispense our thinking. The act of eternalizing views is the act of writing. It’s known that writers’ intentions range from seeking to amuse, seeking to apprise, and seeking to persuade to “simply” seeking to rid ourselves of intellectual sneezes. Sometimes, to boot, we writers write “for the sake of” instead of attempting to achieve any fixed goals.
For instance, a recent crop of my writing students used a variety of rationale to justify their using their resources for writing. One emerging wordsmith wrote from passion. Another hankered to record contemporary and historical Israeli goings-on – he was on a truth sharing mission. A third sought to transform a manuscript into a publishable labor. Additional students had additional whys and wherefores for pouring their time, energy, and auxiliary assets into crafting compositions.
As their instructor, it was my job to insure them that each of their impetuses for formulating word worlds was well-placed. Suffice it to say that since my students remained enthusiastic throughout the required, multiple rewrites of their projects, I succeeded. In brief, we writers need far-reaching “permissions” – the type of go-heads that we often fail to generate by ourselves - to sally forth.
Tolerance of our enterprises is one key we use to shore ourselves up. Thorough exploration of our topics is another.
Research is as essential to writers’ get-up-and-go as is endorsement because finding our muses becomes meaningless when we fail to also exert ourselves in regard to our texts’ causality. It’s nice to grasp why we write, nevertheless it’s necessary to grasp that our writing must be authenticated. Said differently, stories with implausible populations or locales, akin to essays with unverified planks, are solely instances of fluff and nonsense. Readers demand and deserve that the words we construe for them have a semblance of significance.
Sometimes, the analyses that undergird our pieces come easy. It’s rather straightforward, as an illustration, to look up the number of planets in the Solar System or to search for the most popular baby names, in Israel, in 1982. Conversely, sometimes looking for information gets challenging. “Happiness,” for instance is tough to succinctly examine, while “the happiness of dachshunds,” is too strange of a focus to be satisfied by a few paragraphs of exposition.
Moreover, when a specimen of speculative fiction features archaea, for example, we prime movers ought to take care to understand the ecological implications of organisms that are nucleus-free, single-celled critters and we ought to be able to explain those varmints’ biochemical functions. In another case, when we murder our stories’ darlings in daylight, it behoove s us to become familiar with the civil laws and the industrialization echelons concomitant to our narratives; literally visible manslaughter doesn’t bring about the desired effect in all contingencies (isn’t it interestingly that skillful fiction writing often requires greater numbers of and deeper classes of probing than does skillful nonfiction writing.)
At any rate, any lack, on our parts, of delving into the matters with which our linguistic efforts are concerned, is one of our greatest stoppages as writers. After all, there’s little point in broadcasting uncorroborated claims or in disseminating poorly expanded plots. Outside of opinion pieces, the most superlative of which are, anyway, skillfully hewn nonfictions based on accessible data, there’s little room in either make-believe or in realistic jurisdictions for unfounded statements.
When we writers forsake inquests into our subjects, our machinations fall apart. In turn, when our writing falters, we get discouraged. Rather than allowing our efforts to molder on our hard drives, we must hold ourselves back from engaging in verbal extrapolations until we have studied the particulars relevant to our works. Poets, essayists, journalists, and novelists, alike, appreciate the value of the depth resulting from our seeking answers to many questions before in point of fact writing
Over all, writing is fun. Writing is exhilarating. Writing requires us designers to decipher why we are bringing together our thoughts on paper, per se, and requires us to determine the extent to which we have buttressed those contemplation. When we affirm our purposes for writing simultaneous with ensuring that the products we bring into being are well fortified, we writers can overcome both collective and personal disincentives to our creative process. That is, we can surmount those elements that trip us up when we want to write.