Karen the nerd

The target of C7 is to "research your topic"

--

About Writing

When I was doing research through the Internet, trying to find some useful information about writing, I saw this sentence. It was written in Chinese and I translate it into English. Here we go, “ Once we write, that’s because we think we’ve got something. We write down something, because we want to share it with someone. However, no matter there’s a reader or not, no matter there’s anyone who can understand what we want to say, we should treat writing as recording our lives and write with our HEART. Writing is not to entertain someone, but a kind of treatment. Through writing, we got recovered from the sick city and found that at least we still had the ability of thinking and we still felt.”

We all know that when people get old, we don’t remember things as clear as we were young. I am not good at remembering, and that’s the motivation I started writing. At the very beginning, I was like writing to myself, recording my life. What’s happening? How I felt toward a movie. Most of the time, it was like murmuring. Then, I got my first reader, and the second reader, and more readers. I started to care about the word I used, the way I expressed my thought. “Am I clear enough?” “Can the readers understand the metaphor?” “How to make myself a better writer?”

I would say, writing is pretty much like make a dish. Before we cook, we have to know who the guests are. Are they children, teenagers, or adults? Then we decide what to cook, Chinese food, Italian food, or Japanese food? After we have the plan in our head, we collect the ingredients from the markets, fish, beef, pork, vegetables, sausage and etc. Then here comes the most important part. How you put all the stuff together and make them a cuisine?

So, before, we start to write, we need to know to whom we are writing? Who are the audiences? Are they kids? How old are the kids? Are they adults? Are they female adults or general publics?

Then we think of a topic or idea that we wan to convey. After that, we search for the information we need to make the article rich, to support our point of view and to convince the audience.

Now, let me go back to the cooking part. Some people may wonder, how writing resembles cooking? If you are an experienced cook, you may understand what I am talking about. At the very beginning when we cook, we grabbed a recipe, gathered the ingredients written on the recipe and we started to cook step by step as the recipe said. After several times cooking, we found that hmm, it might be better if we use fresh tomato instead of ketchup. We started to cook as the way we want. That’s called personal style. Maybe only your husband or kids know the tiny difference. But they won’t forget the taste and smell of your special meal for their whole life.

So does writing. After we define who the readers are, what the topic is, what information you need, we start to create our own page. Without notice, most of the people imitate their favorite writers at the very beginning. They use the phrases they read in the book and they write in a familiar way as some thing they read before. Then, after practicing again and again, they finally find their own way. Again, that’s called personal style!

Finally, in Stephen King’s book 《On Writing》, he mentions that, “if you want to be a writer, you must read a lot and write a lot.” I have to say, I can’t agree with it more. So, never stop reading and write down your thinking no matter where you are, what time it is. Maybe one day, you’ll become a top-sales writer. Who knows?