The Evolution of Your Style: Writing vs. Journaling

There are built-in speed bumps when one's unique writing style is in its formative stages.

First, you are inevitably rewriting. At first, what you may be rewriting, has already been written and rewritten, by someone else.

It may be reworded passages by other authors, or from your mental bag of favorite movie quotes, or catchy phrases you've heard spoken elsewhere. It isn't really plagiarism, but definitely a derivative process, though perhaps at times subconscious. The writers who resonate with you, help shape your voice as a writer. Even stream-of-consciousness prose is the byproduct of a filtered mentality. If it is not, it will become so in the editing process, as you "rethink" those wild notions in the name of marketable presentation.

Simply restructuring a sentence for clarity can dampen its original, uninhibited personality. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Improv comedians are scored poorly in training classes for a reflexive trait called "self-editing." It's the act of policing one's ideas mid-thought – usually either for reasons of moral stifling, or self-doubt. An Improv instructor, or any art teacher for that matter, would have you believe that to inhibit yourself is an artistic sin. The well kept secret truth is that all the great comedians rehearse, hone and rethink like pathological control freaks behind the scenes. All great artists preliminarily sketch their subject with tedious repetition until they have captured the essence of what they hope to include in the final work.

They take the process seriously and intentionally use its science, rather than simply let the "magic" use them.

Improv unchallenged is for beginners, with no thought to actual stagecraft or showmanship – things that must be mastered, rules that must be learned before one can intentionally break them and make a living with it. A structured, well honed (read edited) comedy act, is what professional comedians offer. A writer is on a similar journey.

Writing with a free, loose, unfettered spirit certainly sounds idyllic, poetic and enlightened. But in truth, it is what neophytes practice. It requires no actual discipline, and therefor no commitment, no sacrifice. It's what journal-keepers do, not writers. Those who make writing their living, do so with the injection of strict self-regulation.

A trained actor sacrifices his freedom for hours at a time to offer a structured performance to an audience who are sacrificing time in kind, to watch it. A person on stage acting out of self-gratification, with no thought toward an audience's edification, is deservedly performing gratis… and ultimately alone.

Long walks on a beach, tossing sticks for your labrador, thinking about writing, is not writing. Writing without an end goal is not writing. Sitting in a coffee shop jotting down whatever pops into your head, into a notebook, is a preliminary act that may lead to actual writing, but is not itself writing. All of these are certainly relaxing, and mind palate cleansing, but none of them are writing.

It's journaling. Only writing is writing. I speak here of "writing," the artform, not just the mechanical act of writing letters into words.

Staring out a window, rerunning a problematic phrase through your head until it sounds right, is writing. Reworking something shallow into something substantial, is writing. Drudging up painful concepts and restating them on paper into something insightful, educational or even shocking, is writing. Making sense out of past chaos, boiling it down into a clear declarative missive, is writing.

Journaling is fun. Writing is work. Journaling is expounding to one's satisfaction, writing is analyzing to an end whether or not that end is gratifying. Journaling is motivated by whim, writing by an ethic. Journaling produces insight occasionally, but is never completed. The sense of closure is artificial. Whereas writing is a journey with a finish line, that brings elation. And a desire to embark on the next journey, whether or not it expounds on the previous one, or one much earlier.

The expository difference between a writer and a word-hobbyist, is that a writer writes when he'd rather not. Inspiration may spark a sudden wave of frantic productivity, but a writer makes himself write when he is not in the mood – when he feels nothing. For writing is not just a favorite pastime, it is a desire that will not go away with enough distraction.

Journaling can go either before or after a game of bowling, dinner, that phone call about the cable TV bill… or wait 'til the weekend. What's the difference? It has its use as a conduit, and an organizational influence for one's thoughts, but not necessarily as an outward expression meant for consumption by an audience. When nothing else is less important, that's journaling. That's a hobby.

To write, a writer must separate his private, innermost self-coddling from his presentational style. If your brave protagonist begins to whine about his fight against foreign spies in the same tone you do yourself about constantly having to wipe down the inside of the microwave after those enchilada casseroles you love that tend to explode when overcooked... Unless you are writing about a whiney spy-catcher, and tapping into your own self-aware whininess, you have no excuse. You are selling improvisation as a rehearsed act.

Like the community theater troupe staging a play with a scene in a barroom, when someone suggests that they drink real alcohol to make the performance "real," you are really just flirting with incompetence. The "realism" is only in the performer's self-sealed perception. The audience has its own viewpoint. They don't pay to watch people get drunk and unpredictable – i.e. experiment with their own foolhardy self-centeredness. That exploration should have occurred well before the troupe began charging an admission price.

Explore your writing voice before merely typing out words and assuming that your "style" is self-evident. You do not decide on a style, you discover it – you WORK toward it. Journaling is where you reflect against your own inner critic. Writing is where one creates a style for presentation to an impartial critic who does not have to live in your head after the final sentence is read.

Even in genre stories, your strength is not in your ability to know all the catch phrases, but in your unique – magnetic – way of phrasing them with a fresh take, even when the ideas themselves are pulp-era ancient.

If you have discovered the secret of aping the style of another writer who's found success, and hope to steal a little of his thunder, that isn't writing, that's cheating. Not that you'll necessarily go broke, as much as you deserve to.

Dying Newsprint – Many of the Wounds are Self-Inflicted

There's another, more deep-seeded reason that the newspaper industry is failing.

It has lost all its former internal discipline, and is mostly populated by people who despise their readership. I've worked on the staffs of 4 different daily papers, and the first one where I was employed in the late 1980s was the only one that actually had a department devoted just to proofreading the content before it published – not just in editorial, but in advertising content. The next one I worked for, in the early 1990s, was the last one that did not depend on the internet to shore up a lack of content. The next one, from the mid-90s onward, had an actual circulation department staffed by people focused entirely on guaranteeing distribution and customer service. It was not a single Circulation Officer, but an entire department.

None of those independent factions exist anymore, like they once did. It was also the last paper I worked for that printed its product on-site, rather than shipping it off to another, then hauling it back for distribution in its intended circulation zone. There still exist writers and editors who put out original product worthy of the cover price, but the overall product becomes more and more inferior as a platform for their diligent work, seemingly by the day.

Most content is bought. Graphics are produced by third-party outsourcing – sometimes overseas. In short, the daily newspaper is now a prefabricated consumer commodity; assembly-line packaged, and aimed at nobody in particular – just whomever will spend money for it. Like a fast-food hamburger. Its faux relevance is maintained by a media industry that stirs up "newsworthy" content based on the obsessive, quirky political whims of a customer base, rather than the edification of a "readership."

The newspaper is an obsolete medium, hanging onto its existence because of a dying demographic that is either computer illiterate, stubbornly attracted to tangible products (like a printed newspaper), or both. I myself was raised to appreciate tangible products in exchange for my money – but now even our money is intangible.

The nearness of this demographic's extinction is precisely why the quality of the product has been handed over to automation-based systems staffed by non-skilled labor and out-of-country interlopers who are allowed to undercut the cost of domestic skill-based labor. Quality has in turn decreased accordingly. The newspaper is now a non-product, designed merely to sell, rather than also serve and inform. People are not considered "readers" but "customers" (read "marks.") In some cases it's brought to you by people who would not find work elsewhere, unless it was in production of something equally as worthless. It is consumed by a section of the population that the media wishes would hurry up and die off.

Don't place blame for this tragedy solely on the Internet.