Member-only story
SINGAPORE | SOCIETY | COLLECTIVE
The Singapore Writers Society
(Shut Up and Write with Julien at Bukit Timah)
The craft
If everybody can draw and everybody can paint, everybody can write. Perhaps you think this is something that only someone who can’t, would say. Because, as once Haresh Sharma has said with necessary gravitas (here):
those who can’t, teach.
Or you might be of the opinion that the fact that everyone can write is nothing but a simple truth. It is.
But there. Like drawing and painting, writing requires certain conditions.
Drawing, for instance, requires watching. A habit of intent observation, that the lucky ones among us have acquainted themselves with early in life.
Like drawing, painting requires the discipline of watching and noticing. And vision. And the swiftness of motion.
All these skills are naturally present in the developing child, and, unless they are constantly reawakened, all have a tendency to vanish into dormancy as we pass from childhood into adolescence.
