"3 Ways Receptivity Leads to Authentic Writing" 🙌📕

Great news! My article about authentic writing was featured today at Women on Writing. Read on!

“3 Ways Receptivity Leads to Authentic Writing”

By: Melanie Faith

We writers tend to be natural observers. Sometimes, that means noticing little nuances of behavior or movement that others might not pay attention to at all. Other times, that includes thinking about an overheard conversation or wondering about the tension within someone’s voice minutes, hours, or even days later.

This receptivity often leads to amazing results and renewed vitality in our writing. According to vocabulary.com, “Your receptivity is your ability and willingness to take in information or ideas.”

Why receptivity? Overall, we writers are meaning-seekers and meaning-interpreters. Not only do we have to choose (or be chosen by) our subject matter, but also we write and edit to bring out symbolism, metaphors, and resonance so that readers will connect to the main ideas and themes we explore. People who are closed off, even partially, tend to miss countless excellent ideas that come their way. The world is jam-packed with ideas waiting for you to notice them.

Here are three top tips for staying open to quality material you might be bypassing:

1.     Receptive writers cast their nets widely first and narrow down later.    

Since March, millions of workers around the world have worked from our home offices. Conferencing online at a distance has become an ordinary new feature of how the workplace functions in 2020 and into 2021. It can be pretty easy to feel isolated and in one’s own bubble when the majority of social interactions after the workday are also often at the click of a button rather than in our living rooms or at restaurants.

As much as my inner introvert rejoices at a good curl-up-and-read fest, I recognize the need for hanging out and absorbing ideas from friends and fellow creative makers. Nobody is an island, even with Covid-19 social distancing. We need to keep coming into regular contact with others’ everyday conversations about hopes, dreams, fears, complaints, and even the seemingly silly minutiae or anecdotes that used to be more commonplace before quarantine.

Art thrives on community and the spontaneous mingling of ideas. Cast your net wide and get a few recommendations to keep ideas flowing.

If you’re not conversing or overhearing juicy, disparate, random or rambling conversation on the regular, you’re probably missing out on some very important ideas that could positively impact your writing. Don’t immediately scroll past an argument or debate on Twitter or Facebook—read through strands of comments, even if you don’t comment. 

Put your favorite podcast on while you work out at home or take a quick run around the block. If you don’t have a favorite podcast or book or song at the moment, text a friend or ten and find out what they’re listening to or reading recently.

2.     Slow and steady: receptive writers listen and give themselves time to reflect before creating.

I’ll admit: this is a hard one for me. My mind is almost always bursting with ideas, and never more so than when I read an article that inspires me or watch a video or overhear a conversation that strike a chord. It helps my writing, though, to remind myself that when I come across new inspiration that I need to tune in and give the information a little bit of time to settle before reacting.

Give yourself some time to take in new ideas by keeping a notebook handy to jot down initial impressions, conversation snippets, or notes, but then give that information some hours or even days to rest in your notebook before using them in a new piece. This little grace period between gleaning exciting ideas and integrating or exploring them will deepen your pre-writing period. Your subconscious mind will make connections between ideas that may surprise and delight you.

Great news: often, in the hours or days in-between first hearing or learning of something and beginning to write, several other tangentially- related ideas or pieces of information will also cross your path and enrich or change the focus of your initial idea, enriching your theme in the process. We’re a fast-paced culture, but our writing process doesn’t have to be rocket-launch speed.

We hear not nearly often enough: slow it down, reflect. I’ll say this again because it’s just so soothing: slow it down.

3.     Receptive Writers don’t put too much pressure on a single idea.

Here’s something we don’t tend to talk about much, but it’s as true today as it was a hundred or even a thousand years ago for scribes: don’t expect your entire writing career or reputation to be built on one magnum opus. Realize that there are many, many ideas out there and likewise a multitude ways to interpret, structure, and create art from those ideas.

Think of your writing as a marathon run, rather than a sprint. Explore each idea to the best of your ability with what you know now, but realize that you have many chances to edit and/or add to your ideas during the course of your writing career. Also, if the piece doesn’t immediately gel or if it changes focus or shape, that’s a natural part of the process. If this project doesn’t pan out after endless weeks or months of struggling, it’s okay to let it go and begin another project. There are endless other possibilities to pursue at any given time that may refresh your writing—remain flexible and open-minded about beginning again.

Ease off the pressure for the latest project to showcase every single one of your writing talents, and ease into the openness to each idea’s potential to bring out new qualities in your writing during the writing process.  

Using our natural observational skills will deepen our writing. In addition, such receptivity will work wonders for creating fresh, authentic writing again and again.

Care to learn more? Clickety-click: Developing Your Authentic Voice. Starts January 8, 2021. Sign-ups now open!

Learn more about my other WOW classes and books: click.

"Four Qualities of Authentic Writing" Craft Article Published at WOW Today :)

“Four Qualities of Authentic Writing”

By: Melanie Faith

I read 99 books for fun in 2019. If you’re an avid reader, too, you probably identify with the joys of reading when the minutes dissolve and the pages just keep turning and turning. Conversely, you probably also recall books that plodded so sloth-slowly that you kept counting the number of pages left to the end of the chapter.

As writers, we want our work to have all of the former’s pizzazz and none of the latter’s plodding.

What makes the difference between writing that flows and excites readers compared to writing that falls flat and bores? Authenticity, my friend.

Just like making friends is all about connection, so too writing that resonates creates a bond between author, writing, and reader/audience.

While defining authenticity within prose can be a little bit like getting gelatin to stick to a wall, there are still definite patterns to authentic writing.  We can apply these qualities as a litmus test to gauge the authenticity in our own drafts: 
       
Authentic writing includes imagery that makes the personal universal.

We all have many emotions and experiences. Boring writing tells us explicitly the name of the emotion, such as “He felt happy” or “I was mad.” Vibrant writing, on the other hand, suggests those emotions and experiences with specific visual images or symbols that express ideas subtly.

Many authors, for instance, use color imagery numerous times within a scene to underscore feelings or experiences, such as blue for sadness, green for security or growth, and red for passion or anger. While we are all individuals, we’re not as individualistic as we might at first think.

As Henri Nouwen and psychologist Carl R. Rogers once said, “What is most personal is most universal.” Authentic writing capitalizes on this knowledge to demonstrate our collective joys, struggles, shame, and healing.

       
Authentic writing tends to be understated, rather than overstated.

Ever read a paragraph that was over a page long? What was the result? Probably skimming over or through the paragraph and yawning. Lots of yawning. Rambling writing is the equivalent of the new friend at a party who expounds about everything at great length while listeners look longingly for the nearest exit.

Authentic writing doesn’t meander. It doesn’t cram everything but the kitchen sink into the paragraph or page, either. Instead, it has a theme and a point it wants to communicate to readers and omits details that are off-topic or redundant.
       
Authentic writing writes through, and not around, a subject. We’ve all read through paragraph after paragraph to get to the big revelation of an article or chapter or novel, only to have the author back away from the topic or to take a left-turn after barely any revelation at all. Talk about frustrating! Evasions don’t tend to endear people to each other, whether in person or on the page. Authentic writing includes elements of bravery.

Authentic writing risks something on the page. Authentic writing doesn’t hint at bigger analysis ahead and then offer the reader little or no fleshing out afterwards. Yes, there are many topics that are terribly scary to express and which take great courage to share with readers, whether through a character’s POV or our own.

On the other hand, risk earns readers’ respect; even if they don’t always love what the author writes, they find deflection and barriers worse. One reason readers read is to find connection (“I’ve thought that/done that, too!”); abruptly backing away from a topic or theme you’ve set up is a fast way to alienate readers and friends alike.  

Authentic writing has focus and a take-away without cliché or overly-easy advice or
solutions.

Authentic writing conveys a point without hammering it out by being repetitious. Readers tend to find repetitious writing boring or, worse, self-righteous and sanctimonious; authentic writing, on the other hand, subtly provides a purpose or a take-away and then moves on swiftly for the reader to think further about the topic on their own.

Trust your reader to make personal meaning based on the literary devices you’ve skillfully crafted and move on, to keep the pace popping.

Practice more authentic writing in my online class, beginning Friday, March 13th. Sign-up today!