Blog Post 1: Quotation on Writing

"The reality is more excellent than the report." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

As a writer, your goal is to make your audience feel like they are experiencing your story firsthand. You want to make them feel like they are with you, climbing Mount Everest in freezing temperatures as snow blinds your field of vision. Or jumping with you as you fall out of an airplane 10,000 feet in the air on your first skydiving attempt.

Writing does face unique challenges that other story telling mediums do not. You don't have tools such as video or sound to tell your story.

But you also have some advantages. Done correctly, the written word can capture the imagination of an audience in ways television and radio can only dream of. Only a writer can take you inside the mind of the character. To show you first hand the thoughts, emotions and details that make reality so excellent.

When Barack Obama was elected as the first African American President of the United States, the entire world was watching. His speech was on every news station in the country. His face could be seen in photographs published in every newspaper in the world. We heard his words and saw the emotion he chose to display on his face.

But only Barack Obama knows what it was really like. Only he can describe the feelings, the struggles and the triumphs of a long campaign ending in success. And while Obama will be interviewed and written about for many years to come, his autobiography might give us insight what it was like to be Barack Obama.

That is the power of writing. And while the reality is always more excellent than the report, as a writer you can come pretty close to proving this statement false.