How to improve your writing: Arthur Plotnik and what’s burning inside you
by Tom Aaron
We write to communicate. Two facets of this are what we want to communicate and how we communicate it. Arthur Plotnik’s quote shows us both of these facets:
You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
In this article, I would like to discuss the first facet, what’s burning inside. Pick up a William Faulkner novel and read. You can see what is burning inside him by looking at this sentence from “The Mansion”:
His father was the cobbler, with a little cubbyhole of a shop around a corner off the Square’a little scrawny man who wouldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds with this last and bench and all his tools in his lap, with a fierce mustache which hid most of his chin too, and fierce undefeated intolerant eyes’a Hard’Shell Baptist who didn’t merely have to believe it, because he knew it was so: that the earth was flat and that Lee had betrayed the whole South when he surrendered at Appomattox.
If you would like to look at something more modern, pick up a Carl Hiaasen novel and read. You can see what is burning inside him by looking at this sentence from “Double Whammy”:
He was two steps from opening the door when something the approximate consistency of granite crashed down on the base of his neck, and he fell headlong through a dizzy galaxy of white noise and blinding pinwheels.
Faulkner and Hiassen have different styles, but both write stories about what is burning inside them. These two quoted sections of their writing show us parts of these stories. Before you start writing, think about what is burning inside of you. This could be a novel, a love letter, or information about a commercial product. For good writing, the subject is not important. What is important is that you have something burning inside of you. If so, you need to tell your audience about it. Let’s take a subject that may appear to be less than exciting: building a better mousetrap. Here is the first paragraph of the first draft:
Oscar’s little one bedroom apartment was above a honeycomb of tunnels in what was once a field ruled by brown field mice. The field had become a block of apartments but the tunnels and the mice remained. The mice gnawed holes in Oscar’s walls, nibbled on his cereal, and chewed on his salty sweat-soaked tennis racket. Oscar, driven to throwing books at the mice, howling curses at the sight of his chewed-up tennis racket, and pounding his fist at mousetraps that surrendered Swiss chest to the mice, went to the library and the lumberyard, surfed the Internet, and started to build the ultimate mousetrap to purge his apartment of brown field mice.
If we write well, we can encourage our audience to read what we have written, regardless of the topic. Comparing the Faulkner and Hiaasen quotations with my writing, I know I come in a distant third. Still, if I have something to say, something burning within me, I write. My writing is far from perfect, but I work toward improving, focusing in two areas: reading good English for the unconscious knowledge to write better and editing to consciously improve.
At Aaron Language Services (http://www.aaronlanguage.com), we provide translation, proofreading, and online English coaching for a primarily Japanese client base. If you are an editor, specializing in medicine or the hard sciences, we are always looking for experienced editors. Click on the menu at our top page where it says personnel, in English, for more information about the work and how to contact us.
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