Thanks, appreciated the post! And reminded of the following bits from Ray Bradbury: “Do not, for money, turn away from all the stuff you have collected in a lifetime.”
“Do not, for the vanity of intellectual publications, turn away from what you are—the material within you which makes you individual, and therefore indispensable to others.”
“By living well, by observing as you live, by reading well and observing as you read, you have fed Your Most Original Self. By training yourself in writing, by repetitious exercise, imitation, good example, you have made a clean, well-lighted place to keep the Muse. You have given her, him, it, or whatever, room to turn around in. And through training, you have relaxed yourself enough not to stare discourteously when inspiration comes into the room. ... You have learned to go immediately to the typewriter and preserve the inspiration for all time by putting it on paper.”
- from “How to Keep and Feed a Muse” in Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You by Ray Bradbury
You're welcome, and good book, too. If in a nonfiction piece i put e.g. point A, point B, C, D, etc., i found often that someone liked A, someone D, someone said it was all too much, etc. So if i edit then it's like trying to please someone, so decided to more often keep it all in.
Another v good point - to put it another way, given the sheer variety of people's tastes, in the end writers should always write for themselves first. Trusting that at least some people will share the same taste. As if the trick of being a successful writer is to find the audience.
With non-fiction pieces, instead of sharing the same 'taste' it's sharing similar 'opinions'. And for open-minded and intelligent people so long as you've got a good string of argument going on and it makes logical sense then they will, one hopes, at least appreciate the intelligence of it, even if they don't agree completely. And if they don't agree completely, then they should offer some kind of counterargument or other opinion, then you have a dialogue.
But then again, although you can please some of the people some of the time, there's also no pleasing some people!
Good points. Also in my experience it is writing with readers in mind, too, b/c i want to communicate so there is a kind of writer to reader equation, even if with simply one person in mind. That said, each writer makes a choice of how much writing for self, other, others, combo pak.
True. I think it's much easier with non-fiction because one would normally have a particular subject in mind. In which case, you also have a particular audience in mind...
That makes sense. And the short stories am working on, am thinking of little relatives currently like 1 to 4 years old and another on the way, reading them in early teens or so, as they're not specifically children's stories.
Thanks, appreciated the post! And reminded of the following bits from Ray Bradbury: “Do not, for money, turn away from all the stuff you have collected in a lifetime.”
“Do not, for the vanity of intellectual publications, turn away from what you are—the material within you which makes you individual, and therefore indispensable to others.”
“By living well, by observing as you live, by reading well and observing as you read, you have fed Your Most Original Self. By training yourself in writing, by repetitious exercise, imitation, good example, you have made a clean, well-lighted place to keep the Muse. You have given her, him, it, or whatever, room to turn around in. And through training, you have relaxed yourself enough not to stare discourteously when inspiration comes into the room. ... You have learned to go immediately to the typewriter and preserve the inspiration for all time by putting it on paper.”
- from “How to Keep and Feed a Muse” in Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You by Ray Bradbury
Thanks! And those bits from Bradbury are a much more poetic way of putting it! And of course I agree completely.
Some writers can just be too harsh on themselves, really...
You're welcome, and good book, too. If in a nonfiction piece i put e.g. point A, point B, C, D, etc., i found often that someone liked A, someone D, someone said it was all too much, etc. So if i edit then it's like trying to please someone, so decided to more often keep it all in.
Another v good point - to put it another way, given the sheer variety of people's tastes, in the end writers should always write for themselves first. Trusting that at least some people will share the same taste. As if the trick of being a successful writer is to find the audience.
With non-fiction pieces, instead of sharing the same 'taste' it's sharing similar 'opinions'. And for open-minded and intelligent people so long as you've got a good string of argument going on and it makes logical sense then they will, one hopes, at least appreciate the intelligence of it, even if they don't agree completely. And if they don't agree completely, then they should offer some kind of counterargument or other opinion, then you have a dialogue.
But then again, although you can please some of the people some of the time, there's also no pleasing some people!
Good points. Also in my experience it is writing with readers in mind, too, b/c i want to communicate so there is a kind of writer to reader equation, even if with simply one person in mind. That said, each writer makes a choice of how much writing for self, other, others, combo pak.
True. I think it's much easier with non-fiction because one would normally have a particular subject in mind. In which case, you also have a particular audience in mind...
That makes sense. And the short stories am working on, am thinking of little relatives currently like 1 to 4 years old and another on the way, reading them in early teens or so, as they're not specifically children's stories.