The Secret of Good Writing

   Writing is hard work.
   In olden days, teachers would stress to students these five elements of an essay:
-- Introduction
-- Outline
-- Detail
-- Explanation
-- Summary and conclusion.

   Or, in hallway dialect:
-- Listen up, I've something to tell you.
-- Here's what I'm going to tell you.
-- Now I'm telling you.
-- Here's what it means.
-- That's what I told you. Got it?

   Along the way, teachers insisted that every student essay follow that pattern, guidelines and rules. This can be a useful guideline for some, but stifling to those with writing talent and creativity.
   Once aspiring writers got into journalism, however, they learned to ignore or dispense with several of those rules, especially the first two, and get right to the point of the story, putting a brief outline in the lead paragraph as they touch on the Five W's of good reporting: Who, what, where, when and why, plus how.
   The rest of the news story combines and expands on the detail and explanation. The summary is in the first paragraph, leaving it to readers to decide what the story means.
   And that's the way it should be.
   The secret of any art is not only in knowing the rules, but also in knowing when and how to break them. Put another way, the secret of good writing is not in knowing what to put in, but in knowing what to leave out.
   Teachers too often insist that students follow the rules and never deviate from them, forgetting -- if they ever knew -- that good stories write themselves, and the person holding the pencil (or hitting the keyboard) is an intermediary.
   
  Journalists often follow the inverted pyramid style of news writing, where the most important element of the story comes first, and other parts follow, in decreasing level of importance. This too, however, is only a guideline, and the secret lies in letting the story indicate which is the most important element.
   Or as the editor might say, forget about the preliminary yadda-yadda, get to the story right away.
   This is a useful technique in straight news reporting. Feature stories, with a stronger human interest aspect, take on a life of their own, as writers let the story lead them to the page.
   Put another way, good writers know that the good stories write themselves. Sometimes they do this reluctantly, which means that writing can be hard work.
   And that is the secret of good writing.