Verity's Book

Not an Art, It's a Gift

Writing isn't an easy deal. There's so much you have to keep track of, it seems. You need relatable characters, a p.h. degree in punctuation, and blah-de-blah...

Well, in the time since I've been on Wattpad I've seen a lot of writing. I've seen atrocious grammar and purple prose to make your eyes burn, clichéd historical fiction and Mary Sues (literally everywhere). And I have learned a very interesting truth.

There's good grammar, and then there's good storytelling.

There's those people whose grammar is nitpicky perfect and you can't find the least flaw in their watertight prose. These people usually have at least decent stories because if you have that good grammar you must care enough about writing to do better than "I love horses and blue is my colour and all the boys at school are falling for me the end".

Then there's those people who go like "u & me & i love harry styles i suck a desripshons pls red my book".

And then there's those people who have the gift of storytelling.

These people might have spent the last ten years writing. Maybe their style is mellifluous and their grammar puts their teachers to shame, and they have long eloquent arguments about the Oxford comma.

Yet some of them are sloppy writers. Their grammar is mediocre and their dialogue tags are careless, and their punctuation sucks.

But the oddest thing is, it doesn't matter.

These people have a strange gift. Their story is in them, it wants to be told, and its light shines so brightly that not even the lack of polish can deter a reader. I look at my old writing from, say, five years ago, and even when its grammar is excellent it somehow fails to reach the magnetism of these writers. Reading their writing is like listening to a master balladeer: the simplest sentence, the awkward phrasing, creates pictures of odd brilliance, communicated from writer to reader by an inexplicable, indefinable ability.

This isn't hypothesizing. This is real.

I have come across two people like this, and I honestly declare to you that their stories touched a deep place in me that few others have done. There was a jewel shining that the surface disguise of sloppiness and errors couldn't conceal. Since I met them, their writing has improved, stylistic slips disappearing, errors pruning themselves away. Constant writing will always do that. But I'm proud to say I discovered them when they were still rough-hewn.

I've also met at least one person in the first category of storytellers, the one who is already at a level of stellar quality in her writing. Ellowyne definitely has this peculiar ability, and I am not afraid to say that she is a publish-worthy author.

There's probably others I have met. Those are the ones I'm sure of.

Anyway...  hope you enjoyed that installment of randomness. *shrugs* 'Night.