Beauty and Writing



Dear Real Academics,

I like to write. However, when I was in graduate school, I started to dislike writing...a lot. Is this you? Or perhaps you already really dislike writing?

Here I want to share one tip I learned from being in the P.O.W.E.R. writing services that helped rekindle my love for writing and which, I believe, can help anyone become a more motivated and perhaps even better writer.

That one tip is to read something beautiful. That's right. If you are an academic writer, chances are that you are immersed in reading technical genres of writing. To be frank, most academic writing is, unfortunately, not beautifully written. 

As a human, I believe a little bit of my soul starts to die if I am not exposed to beautiful things after long-periods of time. Perhaps that's why it's so important for me to remember to take a walk and look at the sky or to appreciate art and music and to read beautiful things. 

Beauty does something good to my soul.  

For a writer -- even if you are an academic/technical writer -- there is an advantage to reading  beautiful and well-crafted writing. This writing is most often found under the fiction genre such as short stories, novels, and poetry. But, you could also find beautifully written non-fiction writing. I mentioned Mark Buchanan's The Rest of God, in a previous post because Buchanan writes beautiful non-fiction.



The interesting thing about Buchanan is that he explicitly shares lovely poems he's written in this book. I suspect the practice of writing poetry has helped Buchanan become one of those rare people who write non-fiction beautifully. 

That said, I believe I can become a better academic writer by reading beautifully crafted writing. I would probably become an even better academic writer if I practiced writing poetry!

So, dear Real Academics, the challenge for this week is to go out and read something beautiful. For extra brownie points, don't just read something beautiful, but listen to something beautiful (may I recommend Vivaldi's Four Seasons? I just listened to it last night, and had forgotten how amazing it is). For extra, extra, brownie points, try creating something beautiful through writing or some other art form.

Try it. And see what happens to your soul. See if it makes a difference in your next writing project. I have a hunch it will.

Until next time, keep on writing!

Maggie

www.therealacademics.com

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