Write something worth reading

I urge you, the writer, to plough ahead with great caution.
For one, I am not sympathetic to the pity parties people host in order to get attention of some kind or value and am not privy to their motivations for such things either.

If you are going to write something for the purpose of it being read (not everything that is written is done so to appease, educate, entertain or charge the readers) then you should make it worth reading.

Sometimes we write to drive our demons out. Other times we write in order to help us understand something, maybe even to catalog a perception we have at that moment, but for whatever selfish reason we write - those things aren't written to be critiqued or scrutinised by anyone else. In fact, once we pen such things down we tend not to want to share them with anyone as these are the writings that are not merely close to our hearts, but are the window into our subconcious that is the consciousness that penned it down in the first place.

I digress.

Writing for the the reader is a complicated task. You must know who the reader is, what their level of understanding is, who & what they identify with, how to appeal to them, and how to keep them reading beyond the first stanza, or even the first line.

You see poetry is a funny thing.

Sometimes you must be an impressionist, other times an expressionist. There will be times when humour gets the point across, and other times when the slight of comedy blemishes your work. If you write for the sake of others, you must be very careful, especially if you don't know who you are. And as a writer, knowing who you are is more important than knowing the grammage of paper you're writing on, the type of coffee you're sipping on, or even what time the high tide usually drags in.

You see, the art of writing is not solely dependant on the use of grammar and creative instruments. Good poetry is not written in the hallowed dining halls of posh universities and the shacks of freedom fighters alone. Prose is not the lovechild of formal education and systematic thinking. It's much more than that.

Writers need to work out who they are, what they understand, what they believe and what inspires them before they take on the task of writing for the purpose of being read.

Because if they can't decide who the hell is writing, how can they ever conceive or begin to understand what it is that they are writing?
Let alone who they are writing for.

Namaste