MUSE

March's column for The Greater Canton Writers’ Guild Newsletter

Content can be contentious

I drive my husband batty when I “eyeball” things. I trust my eyes, but he trusts his yardstick more. Our eyes can deceive us, no matter how we feel about something. Thirty-four inches is not a yard no matter how I feel about it, or how it looks at a distance.  This is a unit of measure. We all use it. Architects, builders, designers, mechanics, engineers, cooks and artists. This list could go on. As writers we use the dictionary (or dictionary.com), and grammar rules. Editors and publishers use another unit of measure upon which they base their decisions.  A standard is a unit of measure, however much they vary from publisher to publisher. They have a bar by which all submissions must reach in order to be considered for publication by them. Depending upon publication (and their readership), some standards are higher while others are much lower.  And for many writers there is an emotional attachment to our work that keeps us from seeing clearly any necessary corrections we need to make in order to make our work commercially appealing in order to sell it.  And selling it will get our work into more hands. 

            We cannot base the rightness or wrongness of our writing based upon how we feel about it, for we all feel differently. Some writers use content to shock their readers for attention.  When an overuse of expletives is used, the reader’s focus unintentionally shifts to the words used rather than the story line.

Not all words are created equal

            Words have the power to lift us up, comfort us, and give hope and encouragement.  They also have the power to tear us down.  As writers, we want our words to reach as many people as possible and in order to do that, we need to appeal to as large an audience as possible.  What market and what audience, you ask?  First one must determine who their audience is, then write accordingly.  For example, if you are submitting to a family, educational or public service type publication, one wouldn’t want to write erotica, would you?  To do so would just be asking for rejection.  One needs to be conscious of the words one uses.  Writers can write about almost anything to fit in any genre simply by changing the words they use in their writing.  How’s that for a fluid medium?