Writers

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Writer Summary

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Writers

Writing is essential to many professional careers but can also be a career itself. Most freelance writers of fiction, drama, or poetry must support their work with secondary jobs unless they have produced a bestseller or achieved an outstanding— and long-standing—reputation. Other types of writing are financially viable in commercial or academic settings. These include journalism; research in science, social science, and the humanities; literary criticism; philosophical essays and commentary; reviewing; scriptwriting in both film and television; and advertising and marketing. The importance of writing has increased as the Internet—with its various forms of e-mail, listservs, Usenet newsgroups, online publishing, and Web forums—increasingly dominates communications and extends the verbal mobility of an individual.

Some writers approach their craft as an art form and practice it in strict isolation; others approach it as a product, using teamwork strategies to brainstorm and articulate ideas into a final format. All writing depends on fluency of language, which begins in childhood and develops during primary, secondary, and graduate phases of education. Talent is only the beginning. Good writers evolve through effort, usually over a long period of maturation, but in their career they have an advantage over those who must employ physical skills that deteriorate with age. Theoretically, the wisdom that comes from experience will only enhance the skill, style, and scope of a writer.

One interesting way to discuss the enormous range of activity among writers is to divide writing into creative, factual, and interpretive forms, with generous allowance for combinations. The term "creative writing" is somewhat misleading, since creative and critical processes are involved in every kind of writing, but this is the term commonly used to cover the creation of poetry, drama, short stories, novels, and various other fictional genres. Creative writing depends on the freedom to blend the real and the imagined outside a framework of factual accuracy. Factual writing, on the other hand, requires objective fidelity toknown facts—inasmuch as objectivity is individually and culturally possible. Factual writing can take the form of reporting or synthesizing information for news services, magazines, research journals, textbooks, and other nonfiction publications. Interpretive writing involves the critical analysis of fictional and factual texts, or of physical, sociopolitical, intellectual, psychological, cultural, and historical phenomena. The preparation and apprenticeship for these various kinds of writing vary, as do the careers connected with them.

The work of writing stories, poems, and plays traditionally has not required formal training. The best preparation for a writer is reading widely, writing constantly, and surviving the challenge of an unstructured career and income. The lifestyle of the writer of fiction has often been romanticized. In fact, self-discipline is fundamental, since the deadlines of a poet or novelist are generally self-imposed unless the individual is under contract—a happy situation that few attain without an established track record of publication. (Saul Bellow, one of the most successful and revered American novelists of the twentieth century, writes every morning without fail, consigning the rest of the day to teaching, reading, and other activities that stimulate and feed into his work. Similarly, renowned poet William Merwin maintains a daily writing schedule and fiercely protects his time and privacy to do so.) Since the financial rewards for young writers are precarious, and loneliness is more likely than public response, self-discipline depends on a deep commitment, even compulsion, to write for writing's sake. Moreover, writers shelve or throw away much more than they publish—there is a common saying that the wastebasket is a writer's best friend. Days, weeks, and even years may go by between truly productive periods. With persistent time and attention, however, writers are often surprised by unexpected ideas and solutions that seem to surface from subconscious processes.

The critical exercise of revising is as important as creating an initial draft, and some writers benefit from an editor or peer group to give them feedback on the clarity and effects of their work. Those who pursue a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in creative writing have a built-in structure for this phase, in the form of professors who mentor them and fellow students who can form the nucleus of a lifelong network. The MFA not only provides these benefits within a context that allows time for concentrated writing, but also enables graduates to teach creative writing as a means of supporting their own work.

Whereas the MFA is optional for a successful career in creative writing, a master's degree in journalism has become essential for entering the profession of reporting, including news coverage in print and electronic media. Reporters are typically assigned a particular "beat" (e.g., the police station, city hall, and so on) or subject (e.g., education, culture, sports, politics) in which they investigate newsworthy events, interview witnesses, cultivate sources, and write up accounts based on fact-checking that is double-checked by editors before presentation on television or in print. The ethics of journalism have been subject to close scrutiny when reporters or feature writers make up what they do not know, attribute quotes inaccurately, or assemble composite stories based on representative but not actual situations. Ideally, the more knowledge a reporter builds in a particular area, the more reliable the information. Many other kinds of factual writing either depend on or benefit from the authority of a writer who holds a doctorate degree or has other advanced training. Some textbook publishers even refuse to publish a work written by a nondegreed author, no matter how experienced, and most academic journals assume specialized credentials for articles reporting on or summarizing research in science, social science, and the humanities.

An interesting contrast is the writing of advertisements, where truth and accuracy acquire a commercial standard of measurement, and success derives from effective persuasion rather than objectivity. Writers of advertisements use facts selectively to present products in their best light, competing for the attention of readers or viewers with quick, clever, repetitive, mnemonic phrases. An undergraduate degree in marketing or a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree can boost a career in commercial writing, but a brilliant portfolio of sample advertisements may be just as convincing.

On a higher intellectual plane is the attempt to persuade readers of a theory through interpretive writing. Sociopolitical commentary, literary analysis, art criticism, and biblical interpretation are all examples of writing based on facts, documents, or data related to support a stated viewpoint. Historydepends on who is telling it, and interpretive writing, especially in areas such as biography, can edge close to creative writing when authors must use their imaginations to fill in the gaps of a life long gone. Writing a story, then, can take the form of creating, reporting, or interpreting—each process with patterns of its own—or an innovative blend of all three.