Topic: Writing

(**Editor’s Note:**Another short piece I wrote for school about my writing ability and the character of my writing strenghts and weeknesses. Here because we need content. Hopefully this will be over soon.)

I am a fiction writer who dabbles in nonfiction essays and articles; or maybe I am an article and essay writer who dabbles in fiction. In either case, it’s fairly clear that I am not a poet or a dramatist. It could be a lack of skill, experience, or talent. More likely, this pitfall in my ability is due to divine will rather than anything under my control. Some peopleóincluding meóare not capable of to write poetry or drama.

To say that I can’t write poetry isn’t to say that I’m physically or mentally incapable of writing in verse; however, I haven’t been able to amass any evidence that I am capable of writing poetry, and not for any lack of effort. Numerous times I’ve tried, and tried to write poetry, I’ve worked with a great deal of dedication without producing one poem that fills my definition of good poetry: a group of words that sends a message that is somehow larger than the words on the sheet of paper. I am somehow incapable of doing this.

Unlike poetry, my chances of ever writing drama are not quite as dire. With a great deal of time, effort, planning, and blood letting, it is conceivable that I could write and/or produce scripts that would at least equal the quality of my prose. Despite a familiarity with the form, I have yet to find success writing scripts with a satisfactory similarity to the picture in my mind’s eye. This isn’t to say that a work needs to end up exactly like the creator foresaw, but the work needs to maintain a certain continuity with the authors evolving vision.

Just because I haven’t been able to write a good script, and because I doubt I’ll ever be able to write a poem, I don’t hold any ill regard for either of these forms. In fact, good drama and poetry has a greater influence on my prose than the novels and short stories that I absorb. Quality poetry has the ability to express a message in the purest most beautiful form. Almost every good script, produced or not, can boil a plot into the most visual and descriptive form with minimum use of adjectives and adverbs. The lessons learned in story telling from drama, and the lessons about language learned through poetry transfers nicely into other forms, such as the fiction and non-fiction prose I write. I can only hope that some of this genius is rubbing off on me.

Note: This was originally written as a free-form test entry for Quarto (Domesticat: The CMS); I liked it so much you’re now reading it here on TealArt

Also: Amy asked for test entries, so I started typing and 300 some words and a bit of editing later created this entry. Now that I’ve read over it, I think that I’m going to post it over on TealArt too.

There are two kinds of good books: books that say interesting things and books that say things in an interesting way.

I read tons of fairly bad science fiction books because I’m interested in the characters or what the author has to say. A lot of really great authors just say interesting things. I love reading interesting things that provoke thought, in many ways that is what TealArt is about. These kinds of books have influenced my development as a writer such as it isóand have a definite impact on the kind of person I am.

On the other hand, there are books on various subjectsómost of which I could care less aboutóthat say things interestingly. Barbra Kingsolver and Anne Lamott spring instantly to mind as authors who can take a subject that I don’t have much interest or care for, and tell a story about it in a way that is simply amazing. Language is an amazing art form that I don’t think receives the kind of attention it disserves. I’m not talking about story telling, or persuasion. I don’t mean to say that the ability of an author to make a point using language is all that amazing. Most people, given enough time, editing, and training can write good enjoyable books, stories, and other enjoyable compilations of words; but it takes some strange kind of genius to put language together in ways that have the power to affect people in profound and extraordinary ways.

In the right hands, language is capable of being witty, honest, reverent, insightful, irreverent, revealing, and comforting all in a paragraph or less; and that is only the tip of the iceberg. My hope is that I can be all of those things over the course of a single or even a career.