Good writing is always sought after and consumed eagerly by hungry readers, who often go on empty stomachs for days searching for its delicate and fragile existence as the warm fire to their stomachs. However, the opposite is true as well; the very word “writing” can be taken away and chopped into a million tiny pieces and ripped of its true morals. There are three main categories which an aspiring writer must be able to fully develop to write effectively and concisely. Creativity, practice, and dedication are three integral factors needed to produce something of such grand scale and importance.
Without the creation of otherworldly entities or settings that enrapture and ensnare hearts, reading and writing would become another meaningless menial task. Writing must take readers along on a breath-taking adventure, whether it be from use of setting, imagery, or foreshadowing, to improving the status of the central theme of the selection. To enjoy in a basking hot savanna of Australia or languish in the soothing massages of a five-star Paris spa is more captivating and provides a more intriguing story setting than simply the description of another normal day in Vancouver, Canada. In order to spark your inner writing genius, you must first spend five minutes, prior to your serious writing time, to list off the most random objects, places, or people you can think of at the moment. After the five minutes, you can look over the objects you have written down and try to link them together in a quick paragraph.
This is a great exercise to get your creative juices flowing. Another exercise is one such as imagining your “happy place”, or the area you always go back to whenever you feel stressed or depressed. In this happy place, you could pretend to “copy” it onto another part of your brain, then start to change and alter in it ways that makes it different than the other one. What makes this one a better world? A worse world? If I was living in here, what would I be doing? What conflicts might I face? These are a few questions that you might ask yourself in your make-believe world. Creation of new worlds and identities is important to the overall context of the selection, as the reader will want to be amused or pleasantly surprised, not bored and lethargic.
Everything in the world takes practice, practice, and some more practice. There is nothing else that can possibly sum up success in a nutshell. If you were to take the most successful writer in all the bookshelves of the world, or tally up the points of a chess Grand master, you’d find that the most successful people generally take a few years to mature and grow. Although writing is essentially the integration of words fluidly flowing within a selection, it takes many hours of practice before that writing can even be considered as “good”. Therefore, each day, time should be set aside specifically for writing selections, whether it be from fiction to non-fiction. Poems are good exercises for the descriptive events in novel settings, and non-fiction writing strengthens your vocabulary. Just as the strands of science are all based off and integrated into one another, different styles of writing are stronger when used in conjunction with each other. Also, it is recommended to block yourself from the internet world, at least for a while. Without distractions and a head free to create and imagine, there is not anything practice won’t make meat out of!
Dedication is sometimes a magical airy word in this world. There are those who believe writing is just another way to show off their superiority, and those who keep their articulate words deep inside. However, in such circumstances, it is easy to depict and correctly identify who is who by reading their writing over once. Deep and melodic feelings come from within, and it isn’t easy to fake that by elaborating words to an extent where candidate readers must purchase a pocket dictionary to understand the selection. “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” E. L. Doctorow. However, to master writing to this sense of degree takes discipline and dedication, as many others would simply lose patience and ignore this sense of feeling, instead choosing to pick elaborate and fanciful words as a means to display their emotions. Therefore, dedication must be trained to become a good writer. However, dedication, unlike respect, can only be trained and not earned. In this case, simply by dedicating one hour to a cause or passion you feel strongly about will increase your chances of sticking with your dedication to other aspects of life, such as writing. As many can clearly see, good writers are those who have the ability to captivate, interest, and dedicate themselves to a blank sheet of paper.
All in all, good writing is portrayed through divergent ideas, diligence and the ability to focus oneself onto a single task. Writing exercises that strengthen foreshadowing skills or imagery choices are good ways to improve writing ability. Furthermore, imagining captivating and intriguing scenes will help immensely.Good writing is displayed when someone is able to accurately and precisely depict the feelings of another and transform those arbitrary emotions down onto paper. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it,” Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird. This is exactly what writing brings all of us. It teaches us to understand the world and ourselves, and learn humbleness along with it. Now, what do you think good writing is?
Vivian Li
Toronto, Canada
