Want To Be A Good Writer? Try Being A Good Reader.

My writing was extremely derivative back then, as is the writing of most writers when they start out. Because it was the late sixties, was heavily influenced by the writers I was reading and hearing: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginbsberg, Richard Brautigan and of course Bob Dylan, as well as Phil Ochs, Hank Williams, JRR Tolkein (Lord of The Rings) Mervyn Peake (The Ghormanghast Trilogy) along with pop fiction writers like Ira Levin and William Goldman.

What emerged from all these influences was what people today would call a mashup…mostly blank verse filled with angst and metaphor and predictions of the apocalypse.

But none of that mattered very much. Because even back then I understood, because I also read interviews with all these people, that it would take me a certain number of years to find my own voice, just like it had for them.

"No writer comes fully formed right out of the gate."

Me,Just Now

It takes at least a decade from the time you start doing it seriously till the time you actually can figure it out to the point where you can confidently walk the writer talk.

Ten years later, give or take, I was a senior advertising copywriter, at the hottest agency in Canada at the time. I had amassed enough angry young man poetry to fill several volumes and was starting to get seriously interested in writing novels and screenplays, which I eventually did. But I ultimately decided to abandon both of those areas, because: A) I did not have the zen like patience it would have taken to write the kind of novel I wanted to write and B) Unless you are in Los Angeles, with a kick-ass agent, writing screenplays is basically just so much mental masturbation.

But, what it did was open me up to looking at those particular writing forms in a more in depth way. It was also during this period that I became hooked on thrillers mostly political in nature.

And it was only after reading the screenplay for Chinatown by Robert Towne that I realized I would never be able to write anything that good. It really is the perfect screenplay, and it deserves every accolade it’s ever garnered. It was so good it knocked notion of being a screenwriter completely out of my head.

But all the way along through these two decades, my curiosity about and passion for these two high end forms of writing led me into reading stuff I would never have done otherwise. It led me to authors I still follow today, like Michael Connelly, William Goldman, John Irving Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler and many others.

And that’s really the whole point.

The journey you are on as a writer is directly linked to the journey you are on as a reader.

Finding Truth Or At Least Trying

One of the people who taught me the most about the writing and reading journey was a professor at Glendon College by the name of Don Pilgrim. In my second year, I took his course in historiography, which was one of the most enlightening learning experiences of my young life.

Historiography, as the name implies is the study of historians.

In Pilgrim’s course that year we studied the French Revolution by basically reading and analyzing 6 different histories of that event by six different historians, each focused on a different aspect of the event.

What this experience gave me was a well-balanced historical view of the French Revolution, but more than that, it gave me a bit of personal philosophy that I have carried with me since that time.

In a nutshell it’s this:

If you want to genuinely understand or get to the objective truth about anything, it’s critically important to look at the subject from as many sides as you can find. Because once do that, you will see that the objective truth (insofar as that is possible) will make itself evident to you.

Blogging And Other Vices

As many of you know, I have written a lot about the current US administration and how I feel it is furthering the cultural and racial divides that have always existed in America.

Well, I don’t come to the conclusions I draw simply by reading articles from ShareBlue or any of the other Democratic PR tools, I also read articles on the subjects I’m writing about from the Conservative point of view as well.

Why? Because it’s very good to have a balanced picture in your mind before you start writing about anything. This way, nobody will be able to catch you with your pants down, so to speak.

Sadly, in the case of the current administration, the Conservatives very much appear to be coming across as apologists as opposed to strong supporters. But then again, they can only pump up the right so much these days before it will explode.

That’s not to say the situation won’t change, or can’t change and that’s why you keep on following it from all the angles you can.

Politics is like the weather in Canada. If you don’t like it, just wait ten minutes and it will be completely different.

Now everybody has different areas of interest and different things they like to write about. But the principle of searching out the objective truth has application everywhere as does the modus operandi for finding the objective truth.

No matter which side you take on any issue, you may be called upon to defend your point of view. Knowing the whole story makes in that much easier to do.

Summary

1. If you want to be credible as a writer you need to learn the craft of writing from the technical and aesthetic points of view.

2. If you want to be persuasive and effective as a writer, you need to keep an open mind, and understand that things are not always the way they seem on the surface or from the first information you acquired.

3. In order to keep an open mind you need to read opinions from all sides of whatever it is you’re writing about. And that is relatively easy with all the resources on the Internet.

4. Repeat steps 1-3 ad infinitum or until you decide to stop writing and or reading.

Jim out

Jim Murray is a marketer and creative professional. His partner, Charlene Norman is marketing strategist and operations tactician. Their collaboration, Bullet Proof Consulting, specializes in Brand Engineering: Helping companies achieve more effective branding, stronger reputation management, greater productivity, higher efficiencies, and ultimately, increased profits. In short, Bullet Proof helps companies change their thinking for the better. Find out more at www.bulletproofconsulting.ca

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