‘The writing in this book is absolutely breath-taking.’
‘I love the flow of the writing in this novel.’
‘This self-help book is written so beautifully.’
Have you ever asked anyone about the book they were reading and they replied you with exactly those answers?
Or, even better, have you ever then got a hold of the book in question, and somehow agreed with the so-described ‘beautiful’ writing style?
Or, even-even better: have you ever then tried writing a book or content yourself and felt like a newly walking toddler in the Sahara desert, because the thing you found so unequivocally beautiful in the aforementioned hypothetical book feels then like, alas, a well-crafted mirage?
Don’t despair, dear reader, I’ve been there. In fact, I’m still there right now, each day and night tottering across the familiar Sahara yet perpetually remaining in the smack-bang middle of it.
Great thing is, though, I’ve learnt to fly.
What I mean is, while the question of what makes a piece of writing beautiful is philosophically engaging and, perhaps to some extent, useful in honing one’s craft, one learns to free oneself from the cumbersomeness of the question task by – go figure! – adding a question to the fold of questions: should I heed preening the tone, sentence structure and syntax of my writing for mere beautification?
Or – and this is where the money is for me – should I just tell my story?
Don’t get me wrong, syntax, like tone or punctuation alike, are very important factors which need to be honed in order to write, at the very least, comprehensibly. Besides, no one wants to read a text whose effort can be confounded with that of a six year-old.
No, what I’m contending here is that, once one is confident of having refined basic writing skills, the mirage of “beauty” can be overlooked.
For, whether a myth or a must, I ultimately believe that what readers find appealing in story-telling isn’t necessary how “well-styled” the piece of writing is but rather how palpable, how fresh, how authentic, how immersive the peculiarity of the mood, characters or tone the author of such work is throughout the text.
In other words, standing in the middle of the bookstore, a blurb might blow my socks off and make me holler with a full blast of my vocal cords, but in turn I may very well be underwhelmed if the content isn’t unlike anything I’ve read before (i.e. if the author hasn’t spoken through his own mouth but through the mouth of ‘what has worked in the past’).
Now, that is what truly matters: how much of you (author) is in this book I paid $20.00 of my hard-earned money to read?
Not Stephen King. Not Chinua Achebe. Not Haruki Murakami. Not Paul Auster. And not even your uncle writer.
Just YOU!
Therefore, to conclude, beauty in writing isn’t to be chased or replicated or revered. It is, quite simply, to be dumped in the nearest bin and left there to rot mercilessly. For, should you know the basics of writing, like dating in the human world, someone will eventually find beauty in how you write.
So, dear reader, know that there is only one of you. Let us hear you.
Achike Morgan
© Copyrights 2023 Achike Morgan.