Know "Your Own Take" Whenever You Write

     Every piece of writing you offer to yourself and eventually to readers has its own take. It’s yours. Whether you’re writing a novel or a screenplay, a short story or a piece of flash fiction, a simple query letter or a novel synopsis, even an instructional manual or a syllabus for a class you teach or a bit of technical writing, the “take” of every word you produce is unique and yours. Only yours. All yours. So, where does that ‘take’ come from anyway?    

      We all have different stories, the life stories that are ours alone. Each past event we lived through or wanted to live one more time affects us and influences the next event we live, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way, but always in a unique way that becomes our own pattern of living and way of understanding the mystery that is life . Some of these unique experiences are death, marriage, divorce, loss, our great and terrible teachers , friends that are both new and old, fellow workers and bosses, trips taken or not taken, locales we visited and places we have lived, books and movies we loved or hated, even religion – our own and others we want to study-- or none at all. The good and the bad, the extraordinary, even the supposedly indifferent and hopefully long forgotten will influence our individual pattern of life and our pattern of creativity. These teach us when we decide to create, explain why we must create, and most importantly, how we create.

For example:

     --Do you journalize because you kept a diary as a child for years and love taking pictures and storing memories and reviewing them to remember and relive those former times?

     -- Do you write poetry or flash fiction because you were taught as a child you always had to finish what you started or because you were always entranced by the sounds of words and the rhythms of phrasing?

    -- Do you wax long and hard about every idea you come up with because of a philosophy professor you had or an English teacher who wrote or simply the Grandpa you adored who loved telling detailed stories over and over about his long ago times?

  -- Do you write to music because you play the piano or the violin or wanted to play an instrument, but never did or your mother played classical for years or your father taught you the beauty of jazz?

  -- Do you create best in the deep silence of the latest night because you’re an inveterate night owl or can only create in dawn’s earliest hours because you love the silence, even the loneliness of that special time or perhaps think best in the bustle of a commuter train?

    --Are you always obsessed, overly organized in your thinking because you were trained to do everything that way, or do you brainstorm endlessly on Post- It notes and scribble on pads about every new idea that erupts in your head each day?

    -- Do you love a positive, precise, organized flow of ideas that communicates the wonderful themes of the books you love best, or do you seek a skeptical argumentative flow of phrasing to find a precise conclusion and ending because you were a high school debater or always argue about everything with everyone to find the best, the really right answer to every question, every idea?

      For every story one creates, there is always a different point of view, each drawn from your own years of living, built on the experiences you’ve had, the good and the not so good, the amazing, even the boring and repetitive you don’t think will ever mean anything to anyone, especially you. The finest creativity comes from ongoing reflection and memory, trying to understand even when you don’t want to understand, having to remember how life’s experiences took you from what you had to live through to the truth of those times, no matter what. These are the connections that only by passing through life over time and remembering each intensely do they come to mean something to you. These ideas move forward and backwards in time and memory. They stay remembered or fight to be forgotten. However, in the end they do move in one main direction - - toward you. There they deliver your own very unique understanding of what matters in life for you. Indeed, each of us can even have a different memory of the same incident.

     These immense different connections grow and change and morph over the years endlessly into new connections, new ideas, new knowledge and understandings. They can connect in strange ways sometimes, but always, they can be tracked back to events and feelings that only you experienced as a person. Some connections grow and change and become new connections; others do not because they cannot. They’re cut into the granite stone of your life. Listen quietly whenever you can. You’ll begin to discover your very special “take” on life and living that is just your “take” because it’s about who you are and no one else. Use every detail, good and bad, the wonderful and the funny, and especially the horrid to create your own art and your own passion for producing it. These treasures are your treasures to cherish and shape and share with all those you want to read what you write. 

      Your education and training, your life experiences, your memories, and your own very special reaction to all that is life and its rendition over time is your unique and personal ‘library’ of ideas. Indeed, they can become your very own personal ‘take” on all the moments of all of life, the good and the bad, the boring and the desperate, the wonderful and the tragic. They will make you the writer you are, the writer you can be, and yes, the writer you should be-- a unique writer that your readers will surely want to meet.