slow ascent on writer's mountain
Writing is what I love to do but I am not a good writer (yet). I am trying to ascend a steep mountain where I can see good writers at the peak. Wonderful things wander in my mind. I want to capture them and present them nicely to my readers. However, this task is not easy. Not easy because I am not a writer and English is not my native language. Perhaps if I write regularly, and force myself to write regularly, one day the words and sentences would flow naturally.
There are two parts to any writing. There is the content and there is the language. The content might be good, but the language could be ill-formed or difficult to understand. In this way, I do injustice to the valuable content. Unwillingly, I could make my readers hate the topic because of the language. If the language had been nice, appealing, and smooth they would have loved the topic. That is the difficult part of ascending this writer’s mountain.
One good starting point is to read more and more writings of authors whom I would like to mimic. That would be learning by example. For this strategy to work, I need two steps. First, I need to identify one or more such authors. Next, I would need to start reading their works with the intention of observing their writing secrets.
So, who is my favorite writer? The implicit assumption here is that he or she must be an English author. It is not enough to enjoy his English style of writing, I got to love the topic as well. Given my limited exposure to English writers, I selected George Orwell. I loved the clarity of his language but loved more his topics when he exposes imperialism, tyranny, and methods of ‘big brothers’ instigating fear as a means of controlling the masses. Anyway, the subject of ‘big brothers’ would be future topics.
Once I decided on the author, In parallel, I need to practice writing daily. I need to make it a forced activity daily, as I brush my teeth, go for prayer, read the Quran, and have dinner. Slow and steady wins the race and eventually ascends the mountain.
Dear reader, take this initial post as a benchmark and pass by this substack to check if I am indeed ascending the mountain or not.