Natural Born Writers

Written by Adok

There are people who think that diskmag editors should write in a natural way. Instead of thinking about arguments and structuring one's essay well, you should just let your thoughts flow and write them down. In this way the articles will be more spontaneous and your feelings will become more obvious.

I have been very sceptical about this way of writing. Personally, I like to read articles that have been well considered and structured before being published. That is also the way I write most of the time. Even if I start an article spontaneously, I usually think a few seconds before I write down a sentence. Of course this takes much longer than just writing what comes in your mind. But it's worth the effort: The quality will be much better, people will be able to follow your thoughts more easily, and you won't have forgotten what you actually wanted to say when you re-read the article some weeks later.

There are, however, also editors like Psychic Symphony who write very spontaneously most of the time and do not care so much about elaborate expressions as I do. Probably Psychic would not have been able to release his Demojournal weekly with almost no break had he invested as much time in structuring and proofreading his articles as I do.

Because of all this, I decided to try writing an article spontaneously myself. The topic: exactly the same as of this article, namely the pros and cons of writing down your thoughts with no concept.

The result: My article turned out to have more than 120 text-lines and 9 KByte after only five minutes of writing. However, it was not well readable. I often digressed and included personal stuff in the text that actually should not be published. After proofreading the text, I realized I could not publish this. It was just crap.

This article I have now written pretty spontaneously, too. But I already thought about what to write and how to express it before. And I paused about two seconds after each sentence in order to consider what to write in the next.

I have to admit that I deliberately exaggerated a little when experimenting with the 'natural way of writing'. Nevertheless for me, my usual writing style is really the better way. However, other writers might have different feelings about it. After all, we are different people.

- adok^hugi

"kabul, mon amour"