Teach yourself how to write - easy and fun!
By Steven Neal Wagner While I have a great respect for proper spelling and grammar, this article is not going to address those topics as I have evaluated them as being secondary in importance to being able to get your thoughts and feelings and ideas out onto paper easily. Worry later about the spelling and grammar. If you want to write short stories, novels, songs, poems, web content, work-related projects or even just better letters or e-mails to friends and family, you have come to the write place. Just as the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single footstep, so the intent to write well and easily also begins with its own "footstep"--the timed writing exercise. I learned about timed writing exercises in an excellent paperback I found about 20 years ago: Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. It is still in print (and I would bet that it has remained in print since it was first published). Go get a copy. You will find that Goldberg's approach will liberate you and take you up the mountain of writing confidence in a smooth, gradual slope. She dispenses with formal rules of writing (such as sentence structure, paragraphs and other academic concerns) in favor of the raw and the real. Her only rules run along the lines of "Keep your hand moving, don't cross out, don't think and don't stop until the time's up." She has absolute faith in you to discover and build up the mental muscle and confidence that enables you to bypass the internal critic, which she calls "monkey mind." (I used the exercises in Writing Down the Bones as the underlying steps to creating the lyrics for the songs on my new CD, "Steven Neal Wagner" which you can get by going to http://www.Kunaki.com/Sales.asp?PID=PX00ZRJDB9 ) There are a lot of people in this world that make things unnecessarily complicated for the likely purpose of keeping other people out of the game. Somewhere along the line, somebody started the falsehood that writing could only be done well by "talented" or "educated" or "special" people. (This lie has made its way into many of the arts.) Certainly, there are some special and prolific writers out there (Stephen King comes to mind) but the truth is that the key to writing is writing. This is so important, I must repeat it: The Key To Writing Is Writing. The timed writing exercise is a very easy to confront method (and Natalie's book is filled with interesting variations on the timed writing idea, too). "Too simple," you say? Some of the most powerful and most enjoyable things in life are simple. For people who have gone to college and gotten themselves a Master of Arts or similar writing degree, all I ask is this: Are you writing? Has your college education truly given you the tools to write freely and to your satisfaction? If so, I have no argument. However, I have known more than one college-educated writer who no longer writes or is so hampered by all the rules he/she learned in the university that writing is an unpleasant task. Rules are great, if they help you produce a product. If they just become a fallen redwood across the path to writing, get rid of them. Get Natalie's book. Do timed writings. Write, write, write. Then find you are a writer
