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Theory of Writing
My professor wanted me to write a “Theory of writing” so here is what I got.
Writing is an art and art in its simplest form is history. History of emotion, of pain, of happiness, of fear, of love, of everything under the sun, it’s the map of one’s life that traces the evolution of any form. Pressing ambitious thought into ink on a page is transcendence and a larger task than most people realize, so the study of it gets swept under the rug like it is divinely ordained, as Plato suggests in Ion, but a craft that must be mastered and practiced, teaching anyone who ventures to learn that the art of writing is one of diligence and determination, that you can’t just write, you must strive to write well. And that’s not a task for the faint of heart.
Hemingway, when asked about writing, explained, “It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way”. Hemingway is summing up a mentality that stops writers from searching further into what it means to write well. True, he does recognize that writing is a learning process, but that process should be expressed and shared to help create stories to connect with people. Flannery O’Connor said in Mystery and Manners “very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well”. She outlines writing well as many different things, but it’s universally known that a “novel…
