Some Knowledge

There’s something that has been lacking in this blog recently.  I’ve been trying to put my finger on just what that is.  Could it be an original idea?  Possibly.  I’ve been getting all my latest ideas from the web.  There is something to be said for writing stuff that people are interested in.  My most popular entry was something I saw on the news, then researched online.  If nobody wants to read what you write, then why bother?  Still, originality is something I look for in anything I read.  If I’ve seen the same thing all over the place before, there is no reason to read further.  If I learned the same thing in grade school, why would I bother to go over it again?

I can see where a lot of the ideas that people get for writing about come directly from the news media.  Most of these ideas are the results of what some person does.  A lot of news stories have limited lifespans.  The results of an election are only news until everyone hears about them.  After that it becomes part of common knowledge and any story about that election will be pointless.  Nobody wants to know what the score to last weeks game was, they want to know who will win next week.

It’s probably good to find out something about what people are interested in if you are planning to appeal to a lot of people.  Sometimes this leads to random posts about things that have absolutely no relation to each other.  Still, if you want to find out some information, you look for it specifically.  All those people who read my post about the cookie diet today were here for a reason.  They wanted to find out how to lose weight by eating cookies, and I told them.  I must have had five cookies myself today just thinking about that nonsense.

There’s no reason you can’t say something original about some given topic.  You do not have to write as if you were a parrot, just repeating somebody else’s observations and opinions.  Nobody wants to read the same thing over and over again.  In everything I write I try to inject some original thought.  Maybe I just scout up some links to good information and state my opinion.  It’s a blog entry, not War and Peace.

(That’s a link to a download page.  A link to the actual text might be something malicious to do to any readers using dialup connections.)

In any case, I still feel a bit unoriginal because I haven’t been thinking up all of my own topics.  If you write for a magazine you might not think up your own story ideas.  In general the editor will tell you what he wants a story on.  It’s your job to put together something original and interesting.  Being the editor of this blog myself gives me a lot of freedom.  At times, it might be too much freedom.  How am I supposed to know what people are interested in?  Unless I go around asking thousands of people what they want to read about I haven’t got a clue.

Originality is great in fiction.  There are limits to originality in non-fiction though.  You can not just make up things that are supposed to be true or that people are supposed to have done.  That kind of originality is what gets people in trouble.  You have to get your facts straight and have some references to back you up if you need them.  Personally, I hate reading footnotes and references.  That’s why I don’t use them.  I read all I can find in a certain amount of time on some subject, then what I happen to remember, that’s what I write.

This might not be the best way to go about writing authoritative text.  I’m not really trying to be an authority.  I have a pretty broad knowledge base and use it to evaluate the subjects I read and write about.  If there is something I don’t know I look it up, either online or in books.  I choose what I write about as carefully as possible.  If I have absolutely no interest in some subject I am not going to bother to write a word about it.

Originality is a tricky subject.  All the words we use get their meaning because they are not original.  Words have meanings that are agreed upon, which is how communication works.  If people didn’t all agree upon the meaning of words they would all speak their own language and nobody would know anything.  How you put those words together is where originality comes from.  The scenes and information you present with your skill in language is where you do the work of writing.  Copy and paste is one way to say the same thing as another person.  This is how robots operate.  Word for word copying is not original.  Presenting the same general ideas as another person is not saying anything new.  Stating your own understanding and interpretation of some situation is where originality begins to show.  Giving your own evaluation and opinion on a subject is what makes a piece original.