Poop Shute

Forest For The Trees

I'm reading this book about writing. It's more about handling your own psychology as a writer and staying motivated and focused and that kind of thing rather than a style manual.

It's single greatest piece of advice is actually the simplest. It should be intuitive, but it never even occured to me.

It's sort of a cousin to that old saying "write what you know." The thing is a writer can only write what he/she knows. It is impossible to write about something you don't know about. It is possible to write badly about something you know very little about, but you still know it to some degree. If you didn't know anything about it, then what would you write?

The idea here is you will only write what you know, and therefore if you're having trouble figuring out what you should write, look at all your little tidbits. Any struggling writer has them. You know; hand scribbled notes on napkins and envelopes, short stories, poems, journal entries, hell even blog entries. Sift through that and find the connections. Find your commonalities that keep popping up. You'll see what themes are important to you, and what makes sense to you, or maybe what things don't makes sense to you. You'll see your voice as a writer. Maybe you'll even see what genre you should be writing. Whatever you find, that is probably what you should write about, because it's probably "what you know" best.

So there you go, I've saved you the thirteen bones on buying the book. Today's readers get a free lesson in writing. There is definitely more worth reading in the book, by the way. So if you want to read more: The Forest For The Trees by Betsy Lerner ........in my brief bit of research for this link I found it for about four bones on Amazon. It's certainly worth that if you're interested in any of this.