Spinning a good yarn
Writing is pretty scary business. There is absolutely no way you can string more than two sentences together without revealing something about yourself.
Writing in public is like inviting a bunch of strangers to come hang out in your head. Sort of like having them over to your place to watch TV, except once there you can’t get rid of them. They’re on your couch, in your fridge and on your case.
So you might as well come on in and make yourself at home. Don’t mind the mess, I haven’t had a chance to clean up. Actually, I’ve given up. You would too, if you lived inside my skull.
On top of everything, writing is incredibly hard work. It looks easy enough, you just sit in front of a computer and hack on the keyboard all day and call that work, right?
In reality it’s exhausting. For every word that gets put down on paper, tens have been considered, tried out and discarded. Then you second guess yourself, you go back over what you wrote and see if it can be improved upon, again and again. Or is that just me?
Why then, do we do it? I don’t know about you, but I write because I have something to say and I want to be heard. I’m not in it just for the money or the glory (yeah, right), I want readership.
In addition to blogging about whatever current events grab my attention, I’m also writing little snippets of fiction and non-fiction, some finished and some unfinished sketches of stories that I’d like to test out on you, my dear readers.
If you read one or more of the stories, I’d appreciate it if you leave me a comment, letting me know what you think. I have an idea of where I want to go with this and I need your feedback to help me gauge my progress.
I happen to believe that stories are the main building blocks of all human communication. When we’re trying to get something across to another person, be it to criticize or to inspire them, or even to try to sell them something, we’re telling a story.
If the story is compelling, and we’re good at conveying it, we achieve what we want. This must have been going on since we first huddled around fires in caves, tens of thousands of years ago.
Language can be fascinating, but most of the time we put far too much emphasis on it and far too little on what we’re using it for. Why do we deconstruct language and get lost in logic if what we really want is to make someone understand or feel something?
Yes, the tool we use is important, but let’s not lose sight of the means we use it for, the good story.
So what makes a fine tale? How long or short must a story be to get its ideas and suggestions across? What do we want with our stories, why do we feel so driven to tell them?
Let’s try to find out. I’m posting the first story here very shortly, I hope you’ll like it. It’s not fiction, it’s the story about how I lost a lot of weight and kept it off.
Some day I may even work up the courage to post a piece of fiction.
