Writing is a skill that nearly all of us have. It’s not about taking a pen and paper and creating a mark but the transposition of a thought, a memory or imagination into communication.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect

Anais Nin

One of those bucket list items is “to write a novel” but writing doesn’t have to be that.

It can be a journal – therapeutic transference of your chaotic brain alphabet spaghetti into parallel lines of some order.

I write to discover what I know

Flannery O’Connor

It can be a simple short story or even flash fiction. Try a couple of sentences about something. A picture on instagram. A paused scene on a TV show.

Like art most of us had the mistakes reiterated to us during school. In our heads we don’t sit down to write because we are brainwashed with punctuation and grammar.

Writing comes from story telling and humans in all civilisations have been story tellers.

The purpose of the writer is to stop civilisation from destroying itself

Albert Camus

Writing classes outline story structure and the “correct” way to write. Avoid this. Do this. Don’t do that. Formulaic structure.

Where did this theory all come from. From the way it naturally occurs. Inciting incident, rising action, climax, Denoument.

Three act structures, points of view, narrative formats. The Hero’s journey, W plots, third person Omniscient.

The theory is all there but what’s for?

It creates a comfortable structure. It’s what we are used to. It’s how it should be.

Yet many of the works of fiction and their lauded authors that are considered great broke the rules.

Cervantes, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Jayne Austen, Charles Dickens, Charles Bukowski, Cormac McCarthy. They all broke the rules.

Did they sit down and think of the rules before they wrote? Their brains were likely bursting with the need to write rather than worrying where the comma should go.

It’s about getting the thought, the vision, the idea written down. That’s writing. The rest is editing.

It doesn’t need an obvious start. Nor a finish. It can be scenes [the great Sam Shepard], a written snapshot, a peek through the open door into another world.

Is leaving the reader a puzzle or a riddle better or worse than leading them through a spoon fed open and closed case?

Does it matter?

I can shake off everything as I write: my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn

Anne Frank

Memoir, journal, novel, prose. Off loading your brain onto a page is therapeutic. Its meditative. Cathartic. It’s important