[Writerpreneur] Day 23 - Lesson 0307: Choose Your Project: You Now Have Success At Your Fingertips
In writing anything, you have 7 choices - your project is the last. And is where you can finally start to write...
In the six preceding lessons, you have become familiar with the professional point of view, and have considered the fundamental choices which every writer must make before undertaking any literary project.
You should now have some idea what you yourself wish to do.
Your next step is the choice of your project, and you have to begin by making the six choices discussed in the earlier lessons.
In deciding upon a project, you must first consider which of those choices are most important to you.
For example, it may seem to you that there is only one possible subject for you. Or you may feel that the model is the thing—that you simply must write a play, a novel, or a sonnet.
Maybe your ambition is to appear in The Atlantic Monthly, or The Saturday Evening Post, or Adventure: to you, that market is the immediate goal.
Again, you may think primarily of style, and be quite willing to put everything else second to that one passion. It is possible that a certain literary effect interests you more than anything.
Or you may wish above all to interest a certain reader, or even a single living person, such as a friend or relative, a certain famous critic, or the editor-in-chief of a well-known publishing house.
Your next task is then to decide what you have most at heart, and to make that choice first. That done, you may make the other five choices according to what you have decided is your most vital interest in writing. Such a first choice clarifies everything.
Maybe you can make the choice immediately, that you already made your mind up. Maybe you still have to decide. In that case, you had better reconsider everything carefully, reread the earlier six lessons, check over the programs you have worked out, and then be quite sure you know what you are doing.
For this is a matter of the greatest importance. If you make the right first choice, you are already well on your way to achievement.
Posing Your Problem
Every person is an original; no two are precisely alike.
It is for this reason that we regard human character as the most interesting thing in literature: because it provides, both in the artist and in his human subject-matter, a wider variety than anything else can offer. To you it may seem hardly tangible, but to others it is as obvious as your nose. “What you are speaks so loud, I cannot hear what you say,” Emerson declared. That is why technique is necessary, primarily, because only through the utmost skill is it possible to express in words this vital and indestructible quality.
Your effort should be to find the words that will say what you are. If you can do that, you will be original. If you fail, you will be forgotten.
Only honest men write literature, says the axiom. But just here it is necessary to distinguish between the sincerity of thought and feeling. There are two levels of sincerity: that of the conscious mind, and that within our very bones.
Because of this, you need to have no fear that you can’t express yourself—no matter what you write. You simply cannot help it. The only question to be faced is whether or not you will be able to express it adequately, clearly, vividly, so that what you say corresponds to what you are.
You will sometimes hear a writer whining because he feels compelled to write pot-boilers, prostituting his talents (as he calls it) because he needs the money. But the fellow who writes pot-boilers expresses himself through them well enough—he expresses the fact that he is the fellow who does that sort of thing for money!
But even hacks express themselves far more fully than they realize. If you separate yourself from your own mind and watch it work while you write - you realize that every word you use, every phrase you choose, the turn of your sentence, the drive of your paragraph... All these are conditioned by your state of mind, your physical health and freshness, and the social, economic, and other pressures which bear upon you.
That is why you may dismiss all fears of losing your originality. That is why you had better turn your thought and effort into technique, so that you may create something that says what you are. Then the reader, once distracted by the clash between what he sees you are and what he hears you say, will resolve that discord, And will then rightly hail you as an original genius.
A writer is a person whose task it is to deal with words—but his genuine work is the notation of the human heart. With this caution in mind, it is now time for you to pose your own problem.
The question you must ask yourself now is: WHAT IS IT I WISH TO Do? And another, equally important: WHAT METHODS OF WORK WILL HELP ME DO IT?
If you can’t answer those two questions by now, again review those lessons above. Lay their questions and answers out longhand. Then align those according to their priority. You’ll find your answers to the two questions above during that process.
(Walter S. Campbell)