99 Articles on Medium: Now, I Want to Learn Writing, Seriously
Writing is a set of techniques, too: it requires study, and the best way of learning is by sharing.
Yeah, this is my 99th article on Medium.
It all started at the end of June 2022 with “How are you? I breathe”. I wrote it for the writing challenge 2022 of “Inspired Writers” and became a finalist. What a marvel! I didn’t win, but the seed of the possibility of conquering an audience started living in my heart.
About seven months later, I wrote a second chapter of that story: It’s not a Christmas Gift to Suffocate! Do you know what all that means? A story was born into me.
Now, I have two missions to accomplish to evolve as a writer:
- Learn to decide what it’s worth reading — reading feeds my imagination.
- Learn to write a story — the technique allows me to give light to the story stirring within me.
Decide what it’s worth it to read.
Reading is the other side of writing like water is the other side of swimming. It’s about the environment where things happen.
There’s a big challenge here. The hugest library that has ever existed — the Internet — offers trillions of texts to read: books, blogs, newsletters, and so on. There’s a boundless sea of content, but humans still have 24 hours daily. Surprisingly, the Internet doesn’t extend our time to take advantage of all the knowledge it collects.
We live in unbalanced times when there’s too much, and we don’t have a way to get all that too much.
It’s a matter of selection. It’s a matter of decisions. And deciding what to select requires criteria.
The simplest and most Internet-coherent criterium is reputation. That’s a weak criterium: it’s not enough to read something because most people read it. It’s an autoreferential criterium: read it because many read it.
So what?
ChatGPT says: “The key is to explore, experiment, and discover books that enrich your reading experience.” It’s a good start, but I’m not satisfied because this suggestion doesn’t consider the time.
Again, so what?
The key is starting with a story that resonates with you. Just one story. My choice: “Kafka on the Shore.” It doesn’t matter what’s that one story; what matters is that it’s rich enough to mirror a world that resonates with you.
There’s a connection across all ever-written stories, from Homer to Stephen King. That connection is life. Writing is life because it origins from life, and it nurtures life in an eternal circle. Every piece of writing is a piece of that all: life.
So, don’t waste time choosing, but explore — reputation is a criterium to start exploration, only to start — and stop for a while when a story resonates with you. Read it repeatedly until that story becomes you, and you become that story. Then, go on, but oriented by that story that is now you.
Write a story
Writing a story is imagination, research, and technique. Writers write to fill a gap: writers write missing stories.
That’s the other face of my journey toward writing: what’s missing? It’s respect for the reader. It’s respect for my time spent writing. When you publish some writing, your audiences have to invest time reading it, and the return on that investment must be something new in their mind — something that fills a gap.
You see: writing and reading mirror each other.
Focus on a contradiction: that’s the key. This contradiction is the environment of the characters of the story.
The first principle of dynamics says: “If there is no net force on an object, then its velocity is constant: either the object is at rest (if its velocity is equal to zero), or it moves with constant speed in a single direction.”
The first principle of stories could say: “If there is no contradiction, then nothing happens: either the story doesn’t exist (if nothing happens), or the story tells nothing that deserves a reader.”
Solving a contradiction is filling the gap that makes writers write.
Conclusion
Now, I have a strategy.
I know how to decide what’s essential to read — and read repeatedly — and where to start writing a story: a contradiction.
Is that enough? No, it’s not, but necessary.
The magic happens when you stop reading for entertainment and want to resonate with a story — the story where to stop by. Resonating means that the story vibes with you and vice versa. New vibrations may originate that preserve some crumbles of the story you read and some crumbles of you and are something else. These new vibrations are the seed of a new story, and the need arises to write it.
Afterward, there’s the technique.
There’s a double learning path here: “what” and “how” to write. The “what” is listening and reading, while the “how” is the technique. The “what” and “how” are not isolated: the “what” and “how” speak each other. The technique is the scaffolding of the story.
Back to “How are you? I breathe”; I must expand on its main character: Mr. Long. The “what” has a name and a spark of story, but it’s still blurred — extremely blurred. Anyway, after 99 articles on Medium, I know that I must clarify the “what” and learn a lot of “how” to give life to Mr. Long.
Now, I have a strategy.
