Theory of Writing

         I truly believe this class has taught me there our no set guidelines as to what good writing is. In fact, I believe it depends on your audience and on the format of the writing itself. I think writing is akin to dressing up crap with a well made bow. A well-blended mixture of never happeneds and vague renditions of the truth injected with all the emotion you can manage to exhume from your system. Everyone knows what it's like to disembody their experiences and stretch and distort them into fantastic, exaggerated tales inside their heads. Writing is nothing more than the art of convincing someone that it's the actual truth. It's murdering the truth, stripping away the corpse and building a new host to house it.
What makes writing good are the details. Usually the smallest of them. There are a thousand ways to say something but the differences between each choice of words can be astronomical. There's nothing special about a red door. There's something striking about a door of a crimson shade. And surrealism can be beautiful. The mixing and matching of senses can create and air of synthesia. Words have a knack for painting pictures.

         I don’t know if I would consider myself a good or bad writer. I do however, know how much effort I put forth and how many times I rewrite a certain piece. I personally think my effort and thoroughness greatly depends on whom I am writing for and what I am writing for. I have had history essays where I know very little about the topic and it shows. Not feeling sure about my writing makes my work suffer. If I feel certain about a topic or an area I feel knowledgeable enough to write freely without an unnecessary amount of hesitation.

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair –the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”- Stephen King

  When you write, you express what you feel or what you know about a given topic. You write with your audience in mind but you should never hold back your own feelings. I think the idea of a “good” or “bad” writer is subjective. I think the only person that can declare if you are a good writer is yourself. You know how hard you tried for any given paper; you know how much time you spent on rewriting your writing. You are in charge of your own writing.