Imagine you are cooking dinner and your stove catches on fire. No problem, because you bought a new fire extinguisher the other day, and it's hanging on the wall right next to the stove. You grab the extinguisher and quickly read the instruction label. It reads: “My fascination with fire extinguishers began when I was a young child--early in 1963 as I recall...” I doubt you will think to yourself, “Wow, this will be really interesting to read!” You might rather that the instructions read: “Point extinguisher at the fire, pull the metal pin, and squeeze the black handle.” Knowing your audience and the reason you are writing goes a long way towards defining the style, tone, and content of your writing.
Many well-meaning teachers and schools have done a pretty good job of killing the joy of writing by neglecting the natural origin and evolution of writing. You write a paper, hand it in, get a grade, and, more than likely, it is then buried in a sheave of other papers in the recesses of your backpack. These written works are handed in to a machine and spit back at us with a reptilian calculus and detachment. But words are meant to be heard and read, not damned with little praise or created in a vacuum.
Writing is a conversation from the head and heart to an actual person or persons. This your audience. As much as I love my dog, I seldom send her postcards from my travels. Moreover, most of us don't carry on a conversation when no one is with us. (Although, I was standing beside a guy in the coffee shop the other day who was jabbering away to himself. Later I discovered he was talking on his cell-phone, which I thought was a hearing aid on the fritz.) My wife is a beautiful writer (and a beautiful person, too!). She is also untainted by living with a writing teacher. “I write,” she says, “just like I talk.” This way of thinking is not a bad way to approach writing--plus, when writing, you get to rewind your conversation if you say something stupid.
The written word is always an extension of the spoken word delivered to a specific audience: The written word is simply a new way to remember: Novelists have taken over where the storytellers left off; newspapers and magazines have supplanted the town crier bellowing from the village square, while essayists now give lasting form and testament to the speeches and harangues that for centuries rallied the troops and urged countrymen to join a cause or crusade. Our personal reflections and journals capture our quiet meditations and make palpable the fleeting memories of our lives. Temper the steel of your imagination; hone, and craft the voice you already have, and your words will ring clear and true through the ages yet to come. Your voice is as real as the acorn sprouting in the waiting earth, and, as the saying goes, “No less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here.”
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