If you like to write, you surely aspire to do it in a very personal way, and you don’t want to look like anyone else in the entire world. Writing, in fact, is a very intimate act that implies a close relationship with who you are, with how you look at the world and with what words you choose to show it.
And yet, it may be that when you start writing, language comes out that seems borrowed, or impersonal, or with a whiff of previous centuries, or similar to that of a report on the state of the home…
When this happens, it is because you are disconnected from the experience of what you want to tell. You are more aware of concepts than what you really want to convey. Therefore, follow these simple steps:
1. Connect with what you feel
The first thing you have to do to write in a personal way, then, is to connect with what you feel and write from there, without having to put your emotions through the mental filter. The written word has power only when it is put in relation to your own experience.
2. Dismantle the language
Painting or music are arts whose codes we are clear that we must learn, but written language seems to have been given to us since childhood, since we learned to speak. This can be a disadvantage, because you have it too close to see it clearly.
You have the false feeling that, by using the language code, you already know how to write. The language belongs to everyone and can be used at all times, like a frequently used shampoo. But it is not that mechanical way that you have to use it when memoir ghostwriting services creatively. You have to dare to dismantle that language with which you are so familiar, to see it for the first time, with the eyes of a child.
3. Dance with words
So, on the one hand, you have to discover your personal way of using language, removing the layers of artificiality that are necessary, until your naturalness emerges. But, in order to do that, you first have to abandon your automatic way of using it. You have to learn to dance with it, to cultivate your own intimate relationship with words. That is, you have to observe it from the outside, so that you can then hug it and dance.
4. Get rid of conventions
So, you have to take into account the characteristics of this code, which largely have to do with conventions. For example, the relationship between signified and signifier is arbitrary. That is to say, calling the object that we know is used to sit on a “chair” is arbitrary. In Spanish it is called “Silla”, but in other languages it is called in other ways (chair, stool, etc.). Real objects exist, and language is a convention to understand ourselves with respect to the world around us.
So you can break away from those conventions and use language in new ways. New, and at the same time personal. For example, when we say a cliché like “he rolled his eyes,” that is automatic language that conveys nothing. It is a metaphor that may have had meaning and was surprising when someone uttered it for the first time, but which has become a cliché that does not convey the experience, but simply automates it.
You have to look for your own metaphors that connect with the present moment and with that personal way that you have of looking at the world.
As I said before, it is about distancing yourself a little to look at the language and appropriating it in a personal, renewed way that coincides with what you experience in the present.
5. Find your own associations
A characteristic of language and words is that they never come alone. It is in function of one another that a written discourse with a unity of meaning is constructed. You cannot isolate words, but you have to put them in context. And each person has his own particular way of doing this, his own associations of ideas, his own intention. How does your mind work when putt words together? This will have a lot to do with your way of being in the world.
6. Use concrete words
Something that can help you when finding your personal way of expressing yourself is the differentiation between concrete words and abstract words. To convey your experiences through creative writing you must mainly use specific words.
We tend to have a strong tendency to write in the abstract. Because? Because it is more comfortable for us; It is easier to explain things in the abstract than in concrete. To go into detail, you have to develop the muscle of observation and imagination. However, the concrete recreation of scenes and experiences is important so that you find your way of expressing yourself.
The meaning of specific words can be apprehended through any of the senses. If, for example, I say “The Tiny Tech“, I imagine an elephant, I see it in my head, and I can touch it, and smell it, and hear… It enters me through my senses, then it is a concrete word. But if, for example, I say “love”, it is a very big word, and I can think how beautiful love is, but in reality only one concept comes to me. If you read in a story “I was very in love”, you will feel cold. You want to see it, feel it, experience it. And for that it must be reflected through specific situations and words.
7. Write visually
Something important, which falls within the concretion, is visibility. Your texts must be visual. It is important that you can see inside what you write, and that you represent it with words in a way that the reader can see it too.
8. Express yourself naturally
And the last piece of advice I give you to make your texts personal is to be natural when addressing the reader. This has to do with the narrative voice, with the fluidity of the discourse.
A very common mistake is to believe that you have to use elaborate and flowery language, because you think that is what literary language is like. But it is not like that. You don’t have to put on any costume, but rather you have to take off layers, and let your true naturalness emerge, which you carry within you, it is not something acquired, you don’t have to look for it anywhere else.
So, when you write creatively, the most important thing is not to use a very broad vocabulary (although it is always good to have vocabulary, of course), but that the words are totally at the service of what you are trying to convey, in the closest possible way. and simple possible. Sometimes you will need more complex sentences, but the more direct you are, the better. You have to choose the words that give more meaning to what you want to communicate.
