Having Something to Say

Guest Post by Danny Dowell, www.theologyponderings.blogspot.com

I enjoy writing as a hobby and am not qualified to speak on professional writing, but I have certain musings about trends I see in aspiring professional writers.

One tendency of aspiring writers is they seem to focus solely on the craft of writing. They have a fluid beautiful style of writing and then go to grad school to study the craft of writing.

There is a certain obsession with style that a lot of aspiring writers have. The reality is that most good writing needs content.

Even good fiction is based on content. The content is often a step back and hidden in the backgrounds.

All the really great works of literature are filled with ideas. We may or may not like these ideas but the provoke thought.

There may be social commentary, political commentary, commentary on how people relate to each other, or something that delves into the human psyche. But always the great works have content hidden within.

Sometimes these stories leave more questions than answers.  Content does not need to have a finality.  Content can provoke thought without giving the solution.

We remember stories because they teach us something or move us to feel something more so than because of the language these stories use.

Basically good writing needs to be based on good ideas. Maybe the aspiring writer should not study writing at all but study a broad array of subjects to write about?

Maybe studying writing will lead to a breakthrough for aspiring writers, but fluid style has a limited interest.

People want something which inspires or captivates the imagination. Most of these things are based on ideas.

There are some mass published works that sell wildly and have no content value at all. These works are the sort of thing you hope your friends would not read.

I hope the aspiring writer would hope to have something of value to say. Often having something of value to say is much harder than saying that something well.

A piece of writing can always be stylistically improved by a skilled editor. But a piece of writing devoid of content will always be devoid of content.

The writing style moves to further the content, but it is the content that makes the story worthwhile. Without content the story is just an array of beautifully arranged words which are of little value.