Its wonderful. Good writers are like good painters: they are both artists, they work hard at what they do, and they produce things that people like, and both of them leave a lot to Imagination so that the reader (or the viewer) call fill in the gaps in their work.

But what makes writing special is that you don’t have to have “a way with words” to produce good works. Grammar, syntax, style, word-ordering, alliteration, spelling: all this doesn’t have to be accurate for a work to be good. I’ve read many mispelled works on the net that could have
the caliber of professional works once they are polished up. There are so many people who can write, but there are so few people who actually do. Somebody calculated that if you write two hundred words a day (half an A4 side) you can write a novel a year, and that is as much healthy writing as people should tend to do.

Writing is a craft that is a natural progression from reading. If you read a lot, you can write. And if you read a lot lot lot, you can write well. And introspective writing is the best kind. And writing fiction about the places around you is the hardest kind. Writing a good novel also means being sensitive about your reader audience. That in itself is a kind of a contradiction: You write because you want to, but your stories are so because your readers can understand and appreciate it. I struggled with that for quite a while. Most of the stories at Devart are the kind that are vague. People think being deliberately vague is cool: making the reader guess is something you should do. I don’t agree. Using hazy words don’t tend to make your story strong. It just makes you lazy. Details are the spice of life. The more the details the merrier. And tailoring your work to fit the reader is also not a crime. Good writing always means adaptability, though not at the price of a complete U-turn.

Take it from me, writing is a lot more fun than writing about writing. Some links to help you along:

Deviantart Prose |
Deviantart Poetry |
Small Spiral Notebook