Good writing is not just precise; it’s also poetic. Words are only potent and memorable when they are infused with emotion. Figurative language, sensory details, and rhythm help you create an atmosphere for certain feelings, where words reach beyond their meanings.
Welcome back to Write of Passage Weekly, where you learn to write memorably and unleash the Internet’s serendipity.
Last week, you learned how Nietzsche walked to write and how movement is a catalyst for creativity. Today, we’re discussing the virtues of poetic language — writing that makes you feel as much as it makes you think.
Publish Your Idea in a Day
Also, today is the final day to enroll in this Friday’s Writing Sprint. It’s a one-day, all-day workshop designed where you write, edit, and publish your idea in a single day. If you’re looking for a deadline, feedback, and accountability, join us this Friday, November 3, to publish in a day.
Good writing is not just precise; it’s also poetic. Words are only potent and memorable when they are infused with emotion. Figurative language, sensory details, and rhythm help you create an atmosphere for certain feelings, where words reach beyond their meanings.
J.K. Rowling, for example, never describes a place as “mysterious.” Instead, she feeds us rich descriptions of what places look like to make us feel like we are standing in an ominous space. She doesn’t tell us that an old house is “creepy”; she says, “Some of its windows boarded, tiles missing from its roof, and ivy spreading unchecked over its face. Once a fine-looking manor, and easily the largest and grandest building for miles around, the Riddle House was now damp, derelict, and unoccupied."
Or consider the hallucinatory experience of reading John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, East of Eden. By telling us where the frogs hide and when the birds wake up, he makes California come alive in our minds with colors, sounds, seasons, and faces: the Salinas Valley was “carpeted with lupins and poppies.”
Words can be dimensionless ink on a page, or they can tug on the reader’s heart and become so much more. In fact, that’s what words must do, if they are to be memorable at all. When you use metaphors and similes, associations that stimulate the nerves, when the beat and brevity of your prose create music, you let your reader taste what you mean.
Mark Manson’s success as a writer stems from one central idea: “What feels like play?”
After his dating blog took off in 2012, Mark started writing about all the things that excited him: psychology, personal development, and “self-help for people who hate self-help.” His breakout book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, was the #1 most read nonfiction book worldwide in 2017 (and I swear I saw it on the front table of every airport bookstore).
Mark was once described as “the local drunk who spends too much time in the philosophy section of the bookstore.” What was meant to be a diss became a core part of his Personal Monopoly. Mark is bullish on sounding like himself. The man writes zingers, and that’s why his work resonates.
In this episode, Mark dives deep into how he stays true to his own voice. You’ll learn how he 3X’d his audience in just a few months; how he wrote Will Smith’s memoir; and how he combines quality ideas, catchy titles, and whip-smart marketing.
We cover the evolution of ideas, how to structure them, the “awkward teenage phase” of writing, and how to write in a way that spreads on the Internet.
Andrew Printer reflects on the experiences that have shaped him and commits to writing, as he figures out where he wants to go from here: “I've felt dead a lot of the time and looked it too these latter days. But I haven't been dead. I've been entirely alive, figuring things out.”
Thank you for reading Write of PassageWeekly. This week, try to get poetic and see how well you can manipulate language to evoke emotion.
Happy writing,
The Write of Passage Team
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