The Art and Science of Writing

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

This quote comes from William Wordsworth’s introduction to his book Lyrical Poems. I first heard it as a starry-eyed undergrad with grandiose ideas about writing, and I thought it was so profound that I wrote it in big letters at the top of my lecture notes. I wrote it again inside the front cover of a notebook I used for creative writing. I’m not a poet, but I envisioned myself as a writer in a very poetic way — someone who was overflowing with powerful feelings that, once transformed into writing, would be able to change the world.

I’ve since reread the things I wrote while overflowing with powerful adolescent emotions. They’re far from poetry, to put it mildly. In fact, they’re pretty awful across the board.

This isn’t just because I was an inexperienced adolescent (though that’s certainly part of it). To this day, everything that I write from feelings alone is usually lackluster. On the other hand, everything that I write with a painstaking, clinical focus — even creative writing — usually results in my strongest work.

What happened to spontaneous overflows? Well, I’ve come to realize that writing (and the Wordsworth quote) is often misrepresented. Writing is not something done on instinct, powered by innate talent or spontaneous emotions. Writing is a concrete skill governed by rules and patterns. And like all skills, anyone can learn it.

This philosophy on has guided my approach to writing and, as a result, my approach to my professional career. Here, I’d like to walk through this approach in more detail to illustrate what I think writing expertise really is.

The “Science” Behind Making Art

Consider how a painter works. A good painter doesn’t just slap paint on a canvas as the mood takes them. Instead, they meticulously choose where each brushstroke goes, how thick it will be, what color it is, etc.

Words are a written piece’s brushstrokes; each one is consciously chosen as deliberately as a brushstroke.

Similarly, just as an artist needs to understand composition principles to create a great picture, a writer needs to understand structure to create a great piece. Whether writing a tech blog or the Great American Novel, we need to be able to identify the individual parts of our work — the audience hook, the statement of the thesis, the satisfying conclusion, etc. And we need to know how each piece fits together.

Using my knowledge of structure, I outlined this article before writing and then tweaked the outline during revision. If I didn’t, this piece would be a meandering rant instead of a cohesive argument.

And just as an artist needs to know the different effects of a thick vs thin brushstroke, a writer needs to know the effects of their words. They need to know what impression is created by long and short sentences, what’s gained or lost by using several different clauses in a sentence, or why they might want to switch out the word “obtain” for “get.” Even the length of paragraphs and the placement of dashes makes a difference, and good writers and editors know this difference.

There’s certainly some level of talent involved — I would not have devoted my life to writing if it didn’t come more easily to me than other things. And there’s a level of passion, too — I genuinely find the topic of this article exciting. (It doesn’t take much to get me excited.) But if I worked off nothing but talent and passion, I would produce drivel. My earliest attempts at writing projects are proof of this.  

It’s my belief that the best writing — the best art of any kind — is a matter of technical skill much more than it’s a matter of talent or artistic vision. But when that technical skill is honed, studied, and practiced, something truly magical happens. The brushstrokes combine to make a beautiful image; the words come together to create a powerful story. All those meticulous details turn into a work of art.

A Skill Like Any Other

Having worked as a writer and editor for a several years, I can guarantee that almost no piece of good writing is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Not for the writer, anyway.

In fact, my undergraduate lecturer took that Wordsworth quote completely out of context. After that line, Wordsworth had gone on to say, “and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced … but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.” In other words, poetry evokes and represents powerful feelings, but it’s written by people who think carefully about those feelings before putting them down.

I believe that writing is a skill like any other, no more and no less. It’s a skill that you can learn, practice, and eventually master, but it does require practice — no one can spontaneously write well, no matter how passionate or knowledgeable they are.  

I’ll talk more in future blogs about exactly how I study and practice writing, and about what the building blocks of a strong piece of written content are. And if you don’t have the time to devote to learning a this skill, or even if you just need a little support along the way, you can always hire someone to help out.