Writing WITH COURAGE
Roll up your sleeves, says author and tutor Ian Ayris. Face your demons, and the darkness, and your writing will be all the better for it.
Ian Ayris.
In this series we will, of course, cover all the usual suspects: structure, dialogue, description, editing, etc. There are a million books and articles detailing how to do these. I will be laying each out in the way that I understand them. But my approach to writing is that to learn the mechanics alone is to entirely miss the point of what writing can be.
What separates us as writers – as individuals – is the who is the who that is doing the writing.
Want to just learn the techniques? Absolutely fine. Like I said, we will cover these. And to approach writing from this level is, I want to stress, absolutely valid. Many a successful writing career is built without descending into the dark place within ourselves.
I am not here to tell you how to approach your writing career.
But come with me into the darkness, move beyond the techniques of writing and find the you inside whose need to write is the only thing that makes sense, and from out of these depths will come words and stories and characters you won’t believe. They will make you laugh and cry and tear you to pieces. You will write books others will read time and time again because they see themselves in what you have written. More specifically, they will see themselves in you. The more you can carve your writing from the darkness of who you are, the more a reader will connect with what you have written.