Tag Archives: writing

Writers on Life (more memes)

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Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? Call 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Writers on Life (10 memes)

 

To pass along these remarkable memes, right click on the images and copy/save – and then share widely.

To regularly receive these bons mots, follow By George on Facebook and Twitter.

Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? Call 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

My sentence

Each nightly vision swirls about my head, as I sleepwalk through my days,

mumbling through greetings and conversations, looking for some spark to ignite

and energize, to slap me awake from this weariness that seems to bewilder me so.

 

Yet, I’m hopeless to express in so many words my quest for an original idea

and the strength to get it on paper. A few striking words, strung together:

one sentence to tell all. I need to begin with one sentence

to capture and slay those visions and deliver me from this inertia.

 

That’s the challenge, as big as a mountain before me, the challenge

I don’t want to talk about. I’d rather write and leave the talking to others.

I’d rather scratch out another poem and explore those crevices of my mind,

stretch and contort my thinking to, in someway, free me from my sentence. 

 

— Chris George

 

(A few years back I wrote 10 poems that are compiled under the title: Almonte and the summer of 2013 that was.  This poem first appeared in that compilation and later also found its way into Midstep: a dozen poems towards where I want to be. If you are interested in receiving either or both of these compilations, connect with me – chrisg.george@gmail.com – and provide your e-mail.)

 

Ernest Hemingway on his craft of writing

  • All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you’ve read one of them you will find that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappiness, good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and the weather. If you can give that to readers, then you’re a writer.
  • Any man’s life, told truly, is a novel. There is no rule on how it is to write.
  • There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
  • A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it (you lose it if you talk about it).
  • All you have to do is write one true sentence.
  • My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
  • All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
  • Writing, at its best, is a lonely life…  for he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
  • You invent fiction, but what you invent it out of is what counts. True fiction must come from everything you’ve ever known, ever seen, ever felt, ever learned.
  • You put down the words in hot blood, like an argument, and correct them when your temper has cooled.
  • All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
  • When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel.
  • If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
  • I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced..
  • There are only two absolutes I know about writing: one is that if you make love while you are jamming on a novel, you are in danger of leaving the best parts of it in the bed; the other is that integrity in a writer is like virginity in a woman – once lost, it is never recovered.

Chris George provides reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? Call 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Henry Miller’s 10 Commandments for Writers

  1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
  2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
  3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
  4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! When you can’t create you can work.
  5. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
  6. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
  7. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
  8. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
  9. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
  10. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

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Chris George, providing reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Margaret Atwood’s 10 Rules for Writers

  1. Take a pencil to write with on airplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
  2. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
  3. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.
  4. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
  5. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
  6. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch.
  7. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
  8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
  9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
  10. Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

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Chris George, providing reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Writers on writing

  • I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn’t. Nobody can write the absolute truth. – Henry Miller
  • A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind. – Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. – John K. Hutchens
  • How can I know what I think till I see what I say? – E.M. Forster
  • A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. – Karl Kraus
  • If you would be a reader, read,; if a writer, write. – Epictetus
  • The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it. – Ernest Hemingway
  • The waste basket is a writer’s best friend. – Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast. – Logan Pearsall Smith
  • I’ve put my genius into my life; I’ve only put my talent into my works. – Oscar Wilde
  • There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader’s attention or check his habitual pace of reading – he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic. – Robert Graves and Allan Hodge
  • One way to looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness. – Harold Pinter
  • Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. – Erza Pound
  • My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity. – George Bernard Shaw
  • I quote others in order to better express my own self. – Montaigne

Chris George provides reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? Call 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

10 FAV quotes on writing

  1. Easy reading is damn hard writing.  — Nathaniel Hawthorne
  2. Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite. – Edward Albee
  3. The sovereign rule:  don’t say it, write it. — James Michener
  4. I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it. — William Carlos Williams
  5. I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it. – Janet Flanner
  6. Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. – Hermann Hesse
  7. The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.  — Mark Twain
  8. There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together. – Josh Billings
  9. Only a mediocre writer is always at his best. – W. Somerset Maugham
  10. A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. – Thomas Mann

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Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? Call 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Quotes for writers on writing

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” – Anne Lamott

“Bad things don’t happen to writers; it’s all material.” – Garrison Keillor

“You can fix anything but a blank page.” – Nora Roberts

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” – Stephen King

“Writing well means never having to say, ‘I guess you had to be there.’” – Jef Mallett

“Find your niche, and then go even more niche.” – Joe Pulizzi

“When I sit down to write, I don’t think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.” – Jhumpa Lahiri

“Don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.” – Pearl S. Buck

“Why waste a sentence saying nothing?” – Seth Godin

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach

“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” – Jane Yolen

“Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.” – Barbara Kingsolver

 

Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer or experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Chris George’s 3 Simple Rules for Writers

  1. img_1978newJust do it – write. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down. And, if it’s not the right word, put it down anyways (you can always edit later).
  2. Put your writing away for a night, a whole day, a week (whatever it takes) and then re-read it like you are reading it for the first time. Let your trusted friends read it. Fix what doesn’t read well. Read it one more time, edit and accept it – and then move on (you’ve got more to write!).
  3. Always finish what you are writing. Like a campfire, when you have come to an end of a piece, extinguish your thoughts and feelings and don’t leave anything to smolder. In this way, you’ll have peace of mind to pack up and leave for your next writing adventure.

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Chris George, providing reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Creative Thinking is Work

     Creative thinking is work. You must have passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the process of creating new and different ideas. Then you must have patience to persevere against all adversity.

     All creative geniuses work passionately hard and produce incredible numbers of ideas, most of which are bad. In fact, more bad poems were written by the major poets than by minor poets.

     Thomas Edison created 3000 different ideas for lighting systems before he evaluated them for practicality and profitability.

     Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music, including forty-one symphonies and some forty-odd operas and masses, during his short creative life.

     Rembrandt produced around 650 paintings and 2,000 drawings and Picasso executed more than 20,000 works.

    Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. Some were masterpieces, while others were no better than his contemporaries could have written, and some were simply bad.

This is an excerpt from an article written by Michael Michalko, author of Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques and Creative thinking: Putting your Imagination to Work.  It first appeared in Psychology Today and has reappeared in many forms on the Internet. To read the full article, “Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking” click here.

More on Michael Michalko’s books, read here.

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Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

 

Monday morning thought on “Creativity”

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.

This reflection of creativity is from Michael Michalko, author of Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques and Creative thinking: Putting your Imagination to Work.

Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Benjamin Franklin on improving thinking and writing

benfranklinAs we dig into our post-Labour Day realities, the scribes at CG&A COMM thought it best to review some advice from Benjamin Franklin – a very productive and prolific man. Here is this American genius on how to improve your own thinking and writing skills. Benjamin Franklin writes in his autobiography how he used news copy of current affairs:

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. … I thought the writing excellent and wished if possible to imitate it. With that view, I took some of the papers, and making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then without looking at the book, tried to complete the papers again by expressing each hinted sentiment at length and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should occur to me. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. … I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavoured to reduce them into the best order before I began to form the full sentences and complete the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of the thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and corrected them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that in certain particulars of small import I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encourage me to think that I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.

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Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Oscar Wilde on artistry

  • I’ve put my genius into my life; I’ve only put my talent into my works.
  • A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.
  • There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
  • Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
  • When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
  • The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
  • The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
  • This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.
  • The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
  • The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

 

Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

“The write stuff”

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Whether you need your brand promoted, an issue positioned, key messages polished, or interests advanced, we will provide you with “the write stuff.”

 

We offer an experienced and insightful writing service that produces effective copy to profile, raise awareness and build engagement for businesses, organizations, interest groups and individuals. Chris George leads a team of wordsmiths and public relations specialists who will provide:

  • A talented braintrust to write or copy-edit, and the experience to offer a second opinion or fresh perspective.
  • Reliable counsel and services that will produce clear and creative copy on deadline and on budget.
  • SM & PR strategies with engaging copy and tactical advice for social media feeds and in traditional media channels.

 

Our Writing Services

  • Persuasive PR content and wordsmith services to advance issues, enhance reputations, and to profile and position within the media, public or key stakeholders.
  • Ghostwriting and editing services to support an organization’s or corporate executive team, including writing for social media, presentations, internal memos and documents, correspondence, etc.
  • Social media content services to develop, implement and/or manage a social media strategy.

 

Our virtual assistants will provide executive services that can take care of all your communications and writing needs.

  • Writing
  • press releases & media backgrounders
  • brochures, newsletters, annual reports
  • internal memos & communiques
  • business letters & correspondence

 

  • Editing and Proofreading

 

  • Social Media Content (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)

 

  • Blog Posts
  • writing & copy-editing
  • research

 

  • PowerPoint Presentations

 

  • Internet Research

 

  • Media Monitoring

 

Use our Communications Concierge Service as you need it!

 

This is the easy, convenient way to ensure you have access to a wordsmith or communications specialists when you need them.

 

With Chris, you’re hiring an experienced communications aide, a can-do scribe and idea guy to be by your side. A Virtual Assistant will make you sound and look good!  Our service will relieve you of stressful frustration and anxiety over those looming deadlines. Your Virtual Assistant will save you time – and provide that extra to get the results you need.

 

Connect with us to learn more.

 

Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer or experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

 

 

Ernest Hemingway on effective writing

I couldn’t refer to authors’ rules on effective writing without mentioning my favourite writer and his perspective on what makes great writing. Ernest Hemingway wrote a lot about writing.

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Here’s a few rules from the Master on what it takes to write well.

  1. Use short sentences and short first paragraphs.
  2. Use vigorous English – passion, focus and intention.
  3. Be positive, not negative.
  4. Spend time to edit and rewrite. (“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”)

 

Joanna Young of the blog The Confident Writing Coach catalogued 27 gems from Hemingway on the art of writing.

Here Is Young’s list of Hemingway’s advice to writers:

1 Start with the simplest things

2 Boil it down

3 Know what to leave out

4 Write the tip of the ice-berg, leave the rest under the water

5 Watch what happens today

6 Write what you see

7 Listen completely

8 Write when there is something you know, and not before

9 Look at words as if seeing them for the first time

10 Use the most conventional punctuation you can

11 Ditch the dictionary

12 Distrust adjectives

13 Learn to write a simple declarative sentence

14 Tell a story in six words

15 Write poetry into prose

16 Read everything so you know what you need to beat

17 Don’t try to beat Shakespeare

18 Accept that writing is something you can never do as well as it can be done

19 Go fishing in summer

20 Don’t drink when you’re writing

21 Finish what you start

22 Don’t worry. You’ve written before and you will write again

23 Forget posterity. Think only of writing truly

24 Write as well as you can with no eye on the market

25 Write clearly – and people will know if you are being true

26 Just write the truest sentence that you know

27 Remember that nobody really knows or understands the secret

 

Joanna Young’s blog entry is here:

http://confidentwriting.com/2008/02/27-secrets-to-w/

 

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Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer or experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on writing

Here’s a fabulous American writer – Kurt Vonnegut – on his art form of writing.

 

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.*
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

 

Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer or experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Mark Twain’s thoughts on quality writing

bg164In a letter to D. W. Bowser, in 1880, Mark Twain described what he saw as quality writing:

 

     I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

 

Here are some of this great master’s musings on the art of writing.

 

  • We write frankly and fearlessly but then we “modify” before we print. – Life on the Mississippi

 

  • It is no use to keep private information which you can’t show off. – “An Author’s Soldiering,” 1887

 

  • I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience. – Letter to Fred J. Hall, 10 Aug 1892

 

  • Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new. – letter to Bruce Weston Munro, 21 Oct 1881 (Karanovich collection)

 

  • To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself…Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. – Letter to Emeline Beach, 10 Feb 1868

 

  • The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say. – Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903

 

  • You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by. – Letter to Orion Clemens, 23 March 1878

 

  • I wrote the rest of The Innocents Abroad in sixty days and I could have added a fortnight’s labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvelously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad daylight in the morning, and as I did 200,000 words in the sixty days, the average was more than 3,000 words a day- nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me. In 1897, when we were living in Tedworth Square, London, and I was writing the book called Following the Equator, my average was 1,800 words a day; here in Florence (1904) my average seems to be 1,400 words per sitting of four or five hours. – Autobiography of Mark Twain

 

  • Well, my book is written–let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn’t be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can’t ever be said. And besides, they would require a library–and a pen warmed up in hell. – Letter to W. D. Howells, 22 Sept 1889 (referring to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)

 

  • Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style. – Letter to George Bainton, 15 Oct 1888

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Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer or experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

What makes for an exceptional writer?

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Recently I was asked about the skill set required for writing and what makes for an exceptional writer. In the engrossing discussion that ensued a distinction was made between “writers” and “wordsmiths.”  For the purposes of dissecting this subject matter, the distinction could best be characterized as the line between writing for oneself as a personal pursuit and reflection and wordsmithing for/with someone else for a pay cheque.

 

Here are the key questions and answers from that exchange….

 

Q: What are the primary skills needed to be an excellent writer?

A:  To be an excellent writer, one needs:

  • a healthy mix of creativity and perceptiveness to capture and record the truths of our world in words
  • a masterful command of words:  possessing a good vocabulary and the sense to use the right word for the right reasons
  • the perseverance to revise and rewrite works until they are as they should be

 

Q:  What are the skills needed to be an excellent wordsmith (def’n: one who creates or re-drafts materials for commercial purposes)?

A: To be an excellent wordsmith, one needs:

  • a superior ability to frame ideas and issues in powerful and precise words
  • the nerve of a hard-nosed editor, who will focus on the appropriate style, proper grammar, use of language and words, and the necessary word counts
  • to be part- collaborator, part-facilitator to work with others and accommodate, reason and synthesize all input – and still produce a meaningful, effective piece

 

As both writers and wordsmiths at our firm, we find this type of discussion most intriguing for it cuts to the very core of what we do. It is also the essence of what is describes in our tag line, when we say we are “providing the write stuff.”

 

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Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? Call 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.