Spending your words

by Jamie Grove on Friday, November 2nd, 2007

Writers talk incessantly before they are born. They talk about their opinions and their dreams. They talk about others, things they've read and done. Worst of all, they talk about their stories.

Talk, talk, talk.

Talk is expensive

You do not have an infinite capacity for words. There are only so many words you can run through the wringer in the course of a day. So, how will you spend them?

Few people talk with a pen in their hands. Fewer still stop mid-sentence to write down something witty. No conversations of any value recover from that kind of interruption.

Then again, how many great conversations do you remember? Do they have titles? Do you recall how they influenced your life, your beliefs, your art?

Reading is better than talking

I'll put a crappy book up against the best talkers in the world. 9 times out of 10 the book will win. Not everyone thinks this way of course, but I don't care about everyone else. I'm talking to writers here not regular people.

Writers are introspective in a way few people can understand. Maybe monks on a mountaintop. Perhaps. But even the most dedicated adept is probably not creating entire universes in their head, populating it with people (all their hopes and dreams, etc), then wrapping the whole thing together with a story, plot, what have you.

But you can't meditate on a story forever. You have to write it.

Thinking isn't writing

The longer you hold the story in your mind, the weaker it will become. Sure, you may find that a story lying dormant for years still smolders when you poke at it. But when you really examine the idea, you'll see that it is a single image or character is all that remains. If you haven't written it down, the rest will be a blur.

Yet, as power of the story flows from the mind to the page, it loses power. Then there are editors and critics and a whole host of things taking their share. In the end, what's left arrives in the hands of the reader, who swallows it whole.