Why do I even keep a blog, anyway? I don't know if anybody is actually reading it, so why even bother?
Because I'm not really writing for anybody who might happen to stumble across my site; I am writing for myself. If I ever expect to make a living writing, then I need to write.
Writing isn't something you just jump into. It's a craft, an art. And like every other craft or art, it takes practice. Lots and lots of practice.
The best practice for writing is writing. I realized that this afternoon, when I responded to a post in a Linux support forum. A new user had asked a question, and I wanted to point her in the right direction.
Sadly, so many tech support forums have degenerated to the point where all she might have got for an answer would be, "Read the FAQ, idiot!" or "Why don't you Google it, dummy?"
I wanted to point her in the right direction without making her feel that I was brushing her off. I wanted to do something more than just "shine it on."
So I wrote a very careful response. I started out by telling her not to misunderstand me, because I was sincerely interested in helping her solve her problem, but I thought she might have better luck in the official support forum for her particular distribution of Linux.
My concern was that it is very difficult—particularly on the Internet—to convey tone and emotion with nothing more than words with which to work. But after I had posted my response it dawned on me: "Well, it really wouldn't be that difficult to convey your exact meaning if you were a better writer."
And so this exercise. Or, rather, series of exercises. It's going to be a series of rough drafts covering many different topics. A writing primer, as it were.
As William Faulkner explained it:
[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
....I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Who am I to argue with him?
