Writing isn’t easy
Writing is a skill that requires practice
“Suryash, I know I am a good writer, but it’s just that I don’t write”, said my friend, over a call. I paused; time slowed, my brain still processing what my friend had just said.
That statement made me look like a fool because even after writing 100 articles on Medium, I don’t think I am a good writer or at least I know there’s still a lot of room for improving my writing.
My friend would have written 20 articles altogether and hasn’t written for 3 years, yet he thinks he is good at writing.
People think writing is easy; all you need is a pen and paper or a blank word doc, and words will automatically find their way on the paper or screen.
Writing an innate skill?
People see writing as an innate skill: either you are born with it, or you don’t have it, and these people think writing needs no edits or revisions, and the first draft is flawless. Only fools revise their work. But is writing that easy?
Was Hemingway a big fool to revise his work? I read it somewhere that once, he revised the ending part of his story 29 times.
Just like if you own a car, that doesn’t automatically make you an F1 driver or a rally racer, so just because you have a pen and paper, you don’t become a good writer.
People who don’t see writing as a craft assume that writing is an innate skill, and good writers are born with exceptional writing ability. According to them, you either are born with it or born without it.
They live in a delusion that one can write well without practice, and writing is not a craft that you can learn.
Writing well and writing is different
Anyone can write but writing well takes effort and time. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, so are good writers.
What does writing look when people who don’t practice writing
You may think you can write well without practice, but that’s exactly the writing which comes off as unintelligible and jumbled. Readers want to quit even before they have read the first paragraph.
Something along the lines of:
Where particulars of a partnership are disclosed to the Executive Council the remuneration of the individual partner for superannuation purposes will be deemed to be such proportion of the total remuneration of such practitioners as the proportion of his share in partnership profits bears to the total proportion of the shares of such practitioner in those profits
— Quoted in Ernest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words 2 (Sidney Greenbaum & Janet Whitcut eds., 3d ed. 1988).
So, next time someone says something like, “I don’t write because I don’t want to, but I know I am a good writer.” Let them live in ignorance because ignorance is bliss. They will never see writing as a craft: a craft that requires learning and practice.
They think good writing is a skill that you are born with and needs no learning.
