The Art Of Writing

Writing my blogs, reading other serious bloggers has made me very curious to know why people write, when and how.

Over the last two years, I’ve written my blog or in my journal regularly: often, over prolonged periods of time, even daily. I don’t believe I ever wrote with such constancy during my adult life.

Which is paradoxical, considering that my command of the English language continues to deteriorate exponentially each year I live in Germany. Unfortunately, I do not know any English-speaking persons in my day-to-day life, and thus, when I speak or write in English, I do it poorly.

Even though I have not rewritten with any constancy the years before writing my blogs, I’ve always written: various children’s stories, an outline for a novel, three computer game scripts and a rather long family journal. Each of these projects was written over finite intense periods of time.

Other than the family journal, none of the other documents have been published in the form they were intended. Sometimes this saddens me, most time not. I thought if I studied about the art of writing and reflected upon the importance of writing in my life, maybe I could find a way to join past and current projects.

Presently, I’m working through three very interesting books:

If You Want To Write, A Book about Art Independence and Spirit, Brenda Ueland (1938)
Journal of a solitude, by May Sarton (1973)
One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty (1983)

What is wonderful about each book is that, for each author, life is writing and writing is about life. There is no distinction between the two. They also do not presume to give instruction. They just describe very well how creative living or writing is a long journey, consisting of ever varying landscapes.

The fact that they do not give me lists of things to do, or formal instruction about steps to take in order to be published, has helped me to free my spirit and find ways to transform old projects into new ones.

I’ve decided to rework the children’s stories and illustrate them with collages. I started transcribing (into my computer) my journal entries of the year’s sabbatical I took nearly twenty years ago. I thought I would take the entries from the time before leaving my engineering job at a large German corporation (sounds like Seamens but is spelt different), the year sailing from Scotland to Venezuela, as well as the time afterwards (i.e. before I relocated to Luebeck) and incorporate the personal journal into an interactive, multimedia Internet journal. I’ve also decided to reinvest time and money in selling my game script to Sony again.

What amazes me is how quiet reflection, slow study, and giving myself time to ponder, can create such a shift in perspective. All of that hectic, frantic, I’ve-gotta-decide-now is quite useless, isn’t it?