No Write Way to Right

My young writing partner Elizabeth often used to ask me if she was writing something the right way.  I responded that there is no right way to write.  Sure, there are rules and conventions that help more often than not, but when it comes to writing, you do what comes natural.

I can’t know, but I suspect, this is one of the reasons it is so difficult to get published these days.  I do know publishing professionals, and they all say that publishers want works “like” those of a best selling author.  As close to a sure thing as a publisher can get.

True creativity, however, blazes trails.  I enjoy fiction that I have a difficult time classifying.  Genres, after all, are guidelines to help us categorize written works.  Sometimes, however, the categories just don’t match the reality.

I often write by phrases.  Phrases come to me—often at the worst possible time—that seem to be the basis for a story.  Phrase gets added to phrase, light molecules forming protein strands.  Those strands sometimes form tissue that becomes muscle.  Then a story is born.

Sometimes I do sit down and plan out a story, but in the heat of writing, creativity doesn’t follow a pre-set trajectory.  My writing is alive, and it has a mind of its own.  I’m a mere scribe.  A slave to its bidding.

Having said that, my writing isn’t what I’d called experimental.  Not even stream-of-conscious.  I love prose and the way it forces words to work together to convey ideas.  I like the strange and unusual.  I enjoy being this kind of slave.

If it weren’t for the innovators—those unknown writers of Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, even parts of the Bible—where would we have found the designs to write fiction?  That which never happened, yet, in it’s own way is truer than that which did?

Each generation of writers brings forth new ways of expressing the craft.  There may be a fixed vocabulary, a finite number of words.  The combinations, however, are well nigh endless, and that is every writer’s mandate and greatest challenge.