You Have to Care November 29, 2021 There's a lot of moving parts when it comes to being a writer--everything from grammar to strategies for maximizing your submissions. But one thing that's required that doesn't get talked about as often as it should (guilty, as charged), is caring. If you want to be a writer, you have to care. You have to care about words--and care enough to use the right word, rather than the almost-right word. That means looking up a word you "know" just to be sure of the definition. Or looking for a better, more accurate word to replace the one you just wrote. You have to care just as much about punctuation and grammar and sentence construction. Words are a writer's tools, and a sloppy writer is like a sloppy carpenter. But instead of a table that's wobbly, a sloppy writer produces wobbly thoughts and confusion in the reader. You have to care about the mechanics of writing a story or an article. For nonfiction, that means order and exposition and examples and human interest. For fiction, plots require, well, intricate plotting. It's more than just a sequence of events. It helps to remember the difference between a story and a plot (according to EM Forster): a story answers "what happened next?" while a plot explains things in a causal, "why did that happen?" way. You have to care about your characters. They're more than just mannequins that you move from here to there. They have to have their own reasons--good ones--for doing whatever it is they do, especially when reacting to events in the story. Their motivations matter. You also have to care about the world you're building within your story, even if it's just the normal world we live in. You have to get the details right and make the descriptions lively enough that the reader can see/smell/taste the environment. Speaking of the reader, you have to care about them most of all. They may be reading your story (or article) half-way around the world and weeks or months (or even years) after you wrote it. They won't be able to turn to you and ask "What exactly did you mean here?" They can only go by the words you put on the page. The words that are there are what you mean in that moment, even if it wasn't exactly what you truly meant. Caring about the reader requires sweating over every word, again and again, through revision after revision. It means putting the piece aside for a while and coming back later with some distance, to see if you were too close to the piece and now see some correction or amplification you missed the first time through. It means reading the whole thing out loud, to find places where the words may be right, but sound clunky or could be misunderstood. Then those problems have to be corrected and the whole process started again until the piece is as good as you can make it. There's really only one thing you don't have to care about during the act of writing, and that's yourself. You, the writer, are secondary to word choice and grammar and plot and character and above all else, making it as easy as possible for the reader to understand and enjoy your work. (c) 2021 by Andrew Gudgel email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com