Haven't you heard? You Are What You Read

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Have you ever tried your hand at a line of poetry and got dissatisfied with the trickles that made it to the pages of your writing? Had a go at a set of musical instruments and end up with an embarrassing cacophony of sounds and tunes, with the instruments screaming you leave them alone?

The underlying factor to these crash landings, 99.999% of the time, is your lack of the basics of whatever endeavor you fancied enough to dabble your hands into.

Basics are the foundations a field is built upon. Writing, drawing, singing, photography etc. As a coin, the basics of any endeavor has two sides:

It is very simple to grasp.
It demands you know every length and breadth of it.

Most often than not, people either take (1) for granted or underestimate (2) or worst still, both.

And that is just sad. The best scenario for an analogy could be taken from mathematics. Imagine refusing to teach a kid the basic operations of arithmetic – addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division – then moving on to introduce him or her to fractions. Such class can only end up with a tortured kid in tears and a frustrated teacher in sweat. It is simple. You can’t spell words if you fail to first learn how to recite the 26 alphabets of the English language.

Heaven and earth shall pass away before the debate about the role talent plays versus hard work and the limits of success dies. Nature vs nurture and all that crap. Thing is, a little introspection, reflection and non-narrow view about how good things – write-ups, songs etc. – come to be will end you up at the place most people tend to ignore – the very basics.

You cannot write good essays if you have no concrete idea of grammar and Concord. Doesn’t matter how beautiful the storyline is in your head. Ignorance of the classic rule of showing versus telling, deep POV and a host of other terms @Rhondak and her crew at @TheWritersBlock group throw around will leave your fiction looking like a disfigured beauty queen.

Thanks to Google and the whole lot of tech companies working tirelessly to make cell phones with basic features easily accessible to the remotest part of the globe, everyone can now take pictures but that knowledge of how to play with lightings and angles are what separates @Juliank from the rest of us whose experience with a camera starts and ends with Sunday selfies.

In whatever endeavor you find yourself or wish to dive into, learning, playing and applying the basics is a must-action in order to have a quality output.

How do you learn? You read. Everything and anything; most especially what pertains to your area of interest. Study the work of authors and content creators you admire, track them down on discord not to beg for upvotes but for recommendations on what action you must undertake to be better at your calling.

Banish the thought of the easy way out. Put in the effort. Put in the brainwork.

Put in the hours and the work.

The underlying advice here is to read. You can’t do without it. You want to be like @allasyummyfood? Invest in the best books that teach recipes and a whole lot of other organic experiments that take place on baking tables and frying pans. Should the works of @papa-pepper excite you to bits, texts that cover the arts of homesteading still lie in bookshops and library shelves.

Remember one important tip though: the best. Find the best works and their authors and actively pursue in a way that aims to unearth the creative processes behind their works. Add it to your bag of knowledge, play with it and see what comes out. Always try to apply what you learn and when you are done, learn some more and repeat.

Peace.

Blog contributor: @holybranches Blog editor: @pangoli

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