In the artistic world, you live for your reviews. Whether you paint, act, write, sing or sculpt, it is the reaction of the audience that you await so eagerly. Your work is the extension of your life that you place before others for judgement—in hopes of their approbation, in fear of condemnation. The comments count.
Mind you, there is the occasional asshole out there who fails to understand that criticism should be a good-bad-good sandwich. They fail to understand the spoonful of sugar that is needed with the nasty stuff. You take their inconsiderate rudeness in stride. Their insults toughen you to the realities. The only problem is you often give their stupidity more importance than it deserves.
For the writer, the challenge is always to find subjects that interest you as well as your range of readers. People are easily bored and hard to amuse and entertain.
That is not a complaint. People live their own lives, in varying degrees of awareness to the world around them. The dullest of the dull is still a complex individual with all the feelings, strengths and weaknesses of their experience and fully capable of love, hate, passion, concern and all the emotions as the brightest and most erudite. And you are writing for both and everybody in between.
A writer does not say: “Today I am going to write something for stupid people.” Nor do you say the next day: “I am going to write something for the learned in our society, using big, rarely used words to keep out the riff-raff.”
A good writer writes for all. The words are simple. The sentences are easily parsed. Henry Luce determined many years ago that Time Magazine should be readable for a broad audience. The publication prides itself in that its articles are easily understood by the person who achieved grade nine level in a school with a standard K to 12 curriculum. Using a writer’s tool, known as the Gunning FOG Index calculations, that is easy to assess in every issue of the late Mr. Luce’s very successful publication..
Writing for children is a different situation. Then you must use simple sentences and a vocabulary of regularly spoken words. In English, that is somewhere around 4000 words in an average household. There can be no industry-specific words such as computer jargon, medical terminology or words recently created or picked up from foreign languages. It is words such as this that are pushing upwards the hundreds of thousands of words that are now accepted as part of the English language. It is a living language; subject to change without notice.
Since I neither aspire to write for the school-marmish editors of Time Magazine nor do I write for any children other than my own grandchildren, I tend to communicate in the language appropriate to the situation. If I am taking aim at some rude and childish person who fails to appreciate what I write, without engaging in intelligent discourse on the subject, I might just tell him to take a flying leap.
But to my regular readers—and you would be surprised at your numbers—you are most welcome. Please enjoy these comments and discussions as much as I enjoy writing them. Thank you for joining in.
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