How To Write

Write what you feel, how you feel, as you feel and you won't go far wrong. Style rests in choice of treatment and choice of subject matter. Choose a subject that appeals to you, suit your subject to your style and you will find that no subject escapes your pen. Writing is being, and as you are, so shall you write.

This is true of any art form, and writing is an art. Art is when the writer and the written are one, and the writer speaks from his soul. Do not be merely clever, or you may wind up being too clever by half.

Intelligence means nothing when not mediated through the soul. Intelligence is that through which we perceive, through the senses, and the brain is a muscle, a thing. The soul, in the Greek sense, is that through which we feel. The brain must be servant of the soul, not the other way around.

To be alive is to be intelligent, with all the senses awake and aware. The soul is of the spirit, the brain of the body. The artist sees through the eyes of the soul and speaks from there as well. He is responsive to feeling and responds to it and gives utterance to it in the form of his art.

The question for the artist, or would be artist, is not how to be, but rather how to feel. First, learn technique, the necessary prerequisite, then give vent to your feelings through the medium of your choice. Technique is a means, not an end. The end is feeling, as was the beginning.

True art begins and ends in inspiration. The artist must aspire, be inspired and produce inspiring work. (The purpose of art is to inspire. To inspire to what? To aspire to be inspired. True art makes artists of us all). Roll aside the stone of intelligence, of the senses, and allow your feelings to be, giving life to yourself and your art. Art is expressive of and is an expression of feeling. Re-awaken your feelings, your soul, and give expression to it.

Art is divination, seeing the truth, the essence, the spirit of its subject and is an expression of the soul of the artist, made up of those things as they relate to the subject. As Einstein said, everything is relative. The true artist relates the truth.

I could go on, I can't go on, I must go on. I'll stop here. Start here, in the eternal now.

Have you grasped the truth in your hand? Insubstantial, is it not? Give substance to it and you bring it to life. Life is when spirit and body are one, in you, in what you create and your life and your work are one and both a work of art. Dedication is required.

The barest minimum of learning through the intelligence is required, feeling is all, or very nearly all. Many great musicians cannot read music. Then, how do they do it? With feeling. On that note, a musical one, I end.

But not quite. Ponder these thoughts.
The truth, though imperfectly expressed, is still the truth.
Start before you are ready.
Baby's first attempt at speaking is intelligible only as an attempt, a worthy attempt, a feeling, an expression of feeling, a wish to communicate.
Practice makes perfect.
Every journey starts with a first step.
Now is always when.
The truth, when perfectly expressed, is irrefutable. That must be your objective, perfection itself.
(Forgive my impefections, see through and beyond).
Art is striving, but the strain must not show, edit it out.
I'll be with you in apple blossom time, Johnny Appleseed.
Reality is the essence of the real, art is when the real and reality are one. It is revelatory and a revelation, nothing less will do.
How you are what you are is what makes you an artist or a con-artist. Writing should be what you want to do, you should not wish to be a writer. (The writing comes first). As you do, so are you. By their works shall ye know them.

Writing is being to a writer, writing is when doing and being are one, the doing coming first. It is when the artist is at one with being itself, and the path is through feeling, feeling is the way.

Art is not a thing apart, everything man does is art when realised at its highest level. All may be artists, from road sweepers to kings and back again. What is true of writing is true of everything. When purpose is put first, rather than the person of the artist, art is.

An artist is one who sacrifices himself for this truth. True art is great art, at whatever level, in simplicity lies greatness. The word true is maligned and ignored as irrelevance when, in truth all relevance is relevant insofar as it is relevant to truth.

The truth is relevance itself.

The question how to be a writer, how to be an artist is answered with the question how to be. To be an artist, to be a writer, to be a road sweeper, to be a king is to be true or not to be at all.

The truth is the answer you were searching for, and the truth is a way, a way of being and doing, the form is immaterial. The truth lies within, it is not dead, but sleepeth.

Roll aside the rock of self and set the truth, which is your truth, free. It is yours and everyone else's as well, when you share it. The struggle of the artist is with himself. The self is a millstone around your neck or a milestone on the road to truth. The choice is yours.

An eight-year-old girl, when asked what she wanted to be when she grows up, said "I want to be me". You must lose yourself in order to find yourself.

Put purpose first or, in common parlance, put the job, the work you are doing first, and you are there.

The truth is when how, what, where, when, why and, last of all who are one in the truth, or, as I said in the first sentence, when the actor acts in accordance with true feeling in relation to all of the above.

Everything is relative.

To write is to be, to be is to write. We all write the story of our life, literally or metaphorically. "The moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on, nor all thy piety or wit can call it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it" - Omar Khayyam.

Luckily, in literal writing, we can edit, which is largely a matter, in art as in life, of simplification and deletion, a necessary task and a topic for another day.

David ****