4/14-The Inspiration of Words

I entered a writing competition on Sunday. They always make me a tad nervous. I feel as though a thousand critics are deciphering every word and then judging if it's worthy of anyone's time.

Today, I read through the other contestants and honestly didn't feel a lot of them were good.

There are two types of writing when one is writing about a personal experience.

One who writes about what they see from own perspective.

And one who makes you see from their perspective.

When writing "I, I, I" in a story it can get rather redundant and so it's important to incorporate other types of views either from other people around you and their insights or from a 3rd person view.

For example:
"I saw a man walking down the street and he looked suspicious so I walked across the street to avoid him."

That's a explanatory sentence. And in my opinion, it's rather boring but a lot of people write this way.

Then there's:

A suspicious man dressed in black meandered down the street suspiciously. My heart thumped loudly in my chest as I nervously crossed the street to avoid him.

Now I've put it into a perspective where the reader can feel the tension and understand more about what's going on.

One of my self-admitted flaws as a writer is that sometimes I feel I use too much imagery though and the main point can get lost. But I think it's because I have a deep appreciation for a rather outdated art form of writing.

I recently started reading old classic books I never got a chance to read. I just finished read "A Heart of Darkness" and now I'm reading "Moby Dick."

Both are very different stories but I noticed with older books like that, authors had a way of being so vividly descriptive in everything because people didn't have electronics and access to the vast numbers of pictures and information and entertainment we do today. So in these instances, the words were the pictures.

Traditional Asian plays such as Chinese operas or Japanese Kabuki or even the English Shakespearean plays would take hours and hours of viewers times. But in an era of immediacy and instantaneous gratification, it becomes harder to enjoy longer forms of art as we pack our time with other things.

Regardless, one can still do this expertly. There are authors who are excellent at providing vivid images in short, terse sentences. I can only hope to deftly master such a skill in time.

Point being, the art of writing doesn't come from you writing about what you've done, seen or heard.

It comes from helping other people do, see and hear.

And that's how it should always be. The inspiration of words....