For me, authoring a title felt like a natural calling. I knew the process lived inside me.

 

Once I mastered the process, writing accurately became instinctual. Not that grammar, punctuation, and syntax led me to write heartily. The performance of any engaging narrative comes with an original style and voice that are uniquely the creator’s work. I grew into a philosophical expressionist who understood the psyche of each character I created. My empathic nature, humanizing a character through perspective, shaped the actions that followed.

 

The words used during the drafting process have meaningful reasoning throughout, and I choose wisely how best to identify with an emotional contributor. My protagonist owns the narrative in first person, exists in a reader’s perspective in second-person point of view, and feels gossiped about or spoken about through a third-person effort. Mastering the point of view requires a writer to maintain tense throughout the writing process. Subject-verb agreement is the most critical aspect of a collective work. Sentences play into the paragraphs with a topical structure that combines into pages and then chapters. Sounds easier than the completion process really becomes for anyone unprepared for such a body of work.

 

I do not write a timeline or character profile to maintain a factual or memorable account of the narration while drafting work. The narrative works through a logical process in my consciousness and ends up on a page as I write it out. I don’t recommend this style of writing if the process doesn’t come naturally for you. My work exists deeply in a soulful effort to toss around ideas far before a page sees content. Trust me when I say this is both a curse and a blessing, but I love the outcomes of such discipline and self-exploration. I am confident in my ability to craft a concise story while avoiding mistakes from physically undocumented key facts.

 

The active voice makes for an actionable story. I get so unconvinced that something happens when writers use the passive tense. The protagonist was, is, are, could be, or whatever makes the blah, blah, blah disinterest me enough to stop reading. In dialogue, sure, I can see how a passive voice may create a certain perception of reality. I argue that the active voice strengthens formal, technical, and fictional formats to create clarity. Readers want to know what the heck is going on, and writers have a responsibility to provide a comprehensive text. Maybe I am a work in progress for the rest of my life, but I have the foundation for an actively advantageous narrative down to a science.

 

Controlling the narrative arc means navigating the slippery slope of a concept well enough to end a story without prolonging it with redundancy or descriptive details that add nothing relevant to the narrative. I free write with the intention of going way too far with every narrative, and when the editing process is complete, I have a clean version of a true-to-life account of a story that lived inside me for at least enough time to figure out the concept.

 

My advice is to write in a way that best fits your process, but never surrender to simple rules that may hinder your discovery of something extraordinary about literature. Find your style in the voice that speaks to your experience, and I hope you can relate to the characterization of someone worth getting to know.

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Imagine your finished project, then write it.