Building a Foundation for Good Writing: Gratitude

It isn’t a “method” or “tool” for good writing, but gratitude is an essential mindset for writers.

People have a myriad of activities competing for their time and attention, even when they choose to read, they have endless choices of what to read. Each year, thousands of new books are published. Each month, new magazines hit the newsstands, and each day new newspapers are published. As if that isn’t enough, each moment someone somewhere updates a website with new articles, or new blog posts.

What we write doesn’t matter—novels, articles, essays, whitepapers, corporate reports, or email messages explaining the new vacation policy. People are free to choose whether to read what we write, read something else, or not read anything at all.

Given that, we should be grateful that any reader chooses to spend a bit if time reading something that we wrote, grateful that they’re giving their attention—however fleeting—to our words, to our ideas and thoughts.

And this gratitude should inspire us to do the best we can to convey our ideas and thoughts with grace and clarity. We should be inspired to do the work of writing and rewriting, scrutinizing words, sentences, and paragraphs, striving to make the meaning as clear as spring water.

I’m grateful for each reader who comes here to read my blog, and especially for those who respond in the comments or by email. The fact that you’ve chosen to come here, that you take the time to read my posts and respond helps motivate me to keep on writing, and to do my best to make the time you spend here worthwhile.

Thank you.

Comments

[Joanna Young]

I'm so with you Ray:

"We should be inspired to do the work of writing and rewriting, scrutinizing words, sentences, and paragraphs, striving to make the meaning as clear as spring water."

Thanks for the reminder to be grateful to those who give us their time and attention - and to make our writing good enough to keep them coming back.

Joanna

[*jen]

Thank you. This was very inspirational.