Practice

It’s been a while.

I’m staring at the WordPress post edit interface. The music swings between Kate Ryan’s cover of Ella, Elle La and Mark Knopfler’s Silvertown Blues. So is my state of mind.

I haven’t written in ages. I tried, I really did, as my drafts folder will attest. In a fit of rage, I decided that today I’m not going to bed until I write something sensible. Well, let’s just say I’m really sleepy right now.

William Zinsser, in On Writing Well, describes (non-fiction) writing as a difficult and lonely craft. You stare at the screen, thinking hard for hours; something clicks and you write a few paragraphs; if you’re lucky, you’ll get to keep some of it after you’re done editing. All the while, the deadline looms. The structure you envisioned keeps changing. There are too few paragraphs on the screen…

For Zinsser, writing is ultimately about finding your own voice. Anybody can write about anything, given sufficient knowledge. But the reader wants to be moved, and a necessary condition for that is a certain style and warmth of the text. That and plain old writing skills. No pressure on both counts, eh?

So, it’s been a while. I’m restarting this experiment of a blog. Hour by hour, word by word, practice makes perfect.

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