Art and Craft and Writing

The door into Michael’s arts and crafts doesn’t feel like a portal to “high art”. Crafting seems to be for dilettantes while the modern “artist” often seems to sneer at the practice of craft. To me, art and craft are inseparable. It’s just not possible to make quality art without mastery of your craft, and while not all products of craft are works of art, all pieces of art are products of craft.

Fiction, poetry, even the most prosaic piece of writing can be art as well, and hard to produce without mastery of the craft of writing. The woodworker can cut dovetails and plane wood faces till his edges dull, the potter can throw cups and bowls till the shelves are full. Either practice can develop the aesthetic sense necessary to create works of art in wood or clay. What does the writer do to develop their chops and their aesthetic?

The Opinion section of my local newspaper has an exercise that tones my writing muscles and polishes that aesthetic, an exercise embodied in the submission rules for commentaries. My Salt Lake Tribune welcomes commentaries from the community but imposes a 600 word limit. That limit is a razor edge tool to sculpt the clarity and brevity that marks artful writing.

I usually have a commentary roughed out in my head, I then have to boot up a word processing program with a word count function. Would be great to see that function on Medium, where I do most of my writing. Medium has little interest in brevity so I write my submissions on Microsoft Office. I have a rough idea of the size of 600 words on the page. I pound out my thoughts and then check the count…damn 987 words.

And now for the craft. I tend to write long complex sentences. I break them up, swap in direct verbs for wandering indirect constructions, hunt down and kill the cliches. Next to die are the qualifiers and adjectives. How to convey the beauty of a sunset; a resplendent setting of the sun? Dump the adjective, try to picture an original image. This might take a while. Maybe stained glass clouds backlit by the westering sun…no, that one is costing me words. I like it though, how about the westering sunlit stained glass clouds? It will do till a better image pops up.

Check the count again, I’m getting closer. Back to the first sentence, the first paragraph. These must be an Ali jab to the jaw, not a roundhouse Foreman right that takes forever to land. Each new read the fluff and dross pops out, cut cut cut.

No word count on this piece. I have to guess, but it feels close to 600 and it’s time to quit. Try this occasionally, direct punchy sentences, images instead of adjectives, straight to your point, no wandering allowed, see if you don’t like the result;)