Wisdom of words was brought to mind when I saw this owl photo. Owls trigger me to think about wisdom. I seek wisdom and realized that whenever I stop blogging here, I don’t feel complete at the end of my day. As I have said before; the only way to become a writer, is to write.
Practice is the only way and Blogging is the best way to practice.
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
Aristotle
Besides, I’m mostly writing for myself. What I learned from experience, is that even a badly written blog post, is better than an excellent draft. I can make this story better in the future, as I have done with some posts going back as far as 2004.
There’s nothing as nice as ink on paper, especially a nice ink pen on a fresh page of my Moleskin journal. So as you can tell, I aspire to write well and the main thing I’ve come to learn, is that less is more. Brevity has power. The most powerful writing, succinctly articulates complex ideas.
Wisdom conveyed in words, doesn’t requite very many. Nothing on earth is new, just an evolution of something else. Setting the context is primary and then filling in the blanks is the description of the evolution. Before you can sell a new idea, it’s important to describe the genesis of that idea.
Great writing comes from creating a large block of content, then chiselling away the excess words, discarding fluff statements and articulating just the raw information of the idea.
The art of writing is among the noblest of crafts, in my opinion because it connects your dreams with your reality. Simply put, if you’re a writer and can’t describe what you want, in words, why should you expect to be able to manifest your ideas in real life?
A word to the wise though, about the wisdom of words; every document that you need to do anything you can imagine, has already been written by someone else. Your job as an artist is to craft new documents from older ones. Be warned though, you must express your own ideas, not the person from who you may be borrowing words, so do not plagiarize!
Write more and the better your writing will become.
Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, and the Art of Revision
“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.”
Ernest Hemingway
“As a writer you should not judge. You should understand,”Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) counseled in his 1935 Esquire compendium of writing advice, addressed to an archetypal young correspondent but based on a real-life encounter that had taken place a year earlier.
In 1934, a 22-year-old aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson set out to meet his literary hero, hoping to steal a few moments with Hemingway to talk about writing.
Samuelson recorded the experience and its multitude of learnings in a manuscript that was only discovered by his daughter after his death in 1981. It was eventually published as With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba (public library) — the closest thing to a psychological profile of the great writer.
Wisdom of words Photo credit: left-hand on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-ND Hemingway’s grave Photo credit: Thomas Hawk on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC
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