Author Orson Scott Card had it right when he summed up exactly who is made to write and how easy or difficult is it to come up with ideas.
He said, “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.”
In other words, anyone can be a writer: whether people choose to write stories, poems, journal entries, songs or even a collected series of inspirational quotes. It does not matter how, when or why. Nature, activities or happenings in everyday life can inspire a person to write. We just have to be able to see these story ideas and write them down. Not everything will become a great work of art, but it might at least serve as an uplifting journal or blog entry for us one day.
So many people check writing off their list of hobbies because they either perceive writing as a talent they could never possess, or they are conditioned by school assignments to believe that to write is to suffer. So many famous authors, commonly people who started off with nothing or who had to suffer multiple failures before their work was known, would say writing is not painful.
“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up,” writer Jane Yolen stated. She couldn’t be more right. As any creative writing professor at Mississippi State University would tell you, writing is an exercise. Practice makes perfect. The only way to set this practice in motion is to understand writing has value.
The reason we have so much literature and know so much about history from hundreds of years ago is not because of any one person’s special talent. It is because people saw value in what was happening around them and chose to write it down or document it, whether it was through cave paintings or in print. Written work is probably how future populations will study our culture hundreds of years from now.
Writing is also healthy for the mind and body. The person that can get to the point where some form of writing is a stress reliever already has a head start in health. Writing is a good tool for sharpening the mind and good exercise for perception and memory retention. People who write may also be more observant. Many writers, such as Stephen King, argue good writers must have an unbelievable perception and value for truth. As a writer, one might find that the focus is no longer just on them it is both on them and the world around them, because that is what it takes to write a realistic story.
Travel and nature are good ways to develop a sense of observation and a unique style of writing. If you take a vacation or study abroad, jot down the events or things that made your experience memorable and see how you can sum up what happened on paper in a way it deserves to be perceived from another person’s point of view. This is the value of writing.
