Writing

Writing is a general term for marking or recording an idea, information, data, or concept onto a medium which is created for that exact purpose. Although, there are instances where writing does occur on a surface that was not necessarily intended to be written upon: graffiti for example is the act of "writing" on a public surface, usually in spray paint. Graffiti is not limited to paint, but can occur in pen, pencil, marker, chalk, or other implement.

Writers

In the history of literature, there are a number of writers who have made themselves popular for the kinds of subjects they write about or how they write. William Shakespeare, for example was a famous writer of stage plays. Stephen King is a writer known for his writing of suspense and horror novels. Shel Silvenstein is a known writer and poet of books for children.

History of Writing

Some of the earliest known works date back to civilizations that had an alphabet, in which they formed words and sounds to convey a subject or idea. The egyptians, the aztecs, the greeks, and the romans all had a system of letters and numbers which they used for this purpose, although the roman alphabet or latin alphabet became a de-facto standard for many "romance" languages that exist today(french, spanish, italian to name a few).

How to write

Literature

Writing is an art, good writing may be learned but the best writers were undoubtedly naturally skilled. Thus, there's no guidelines to the good writing that could make a good writer out of an average writer. However, many writers wrote about writing.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez exposed his idea of a good writer in his book "Como se cuenta un cuento".. The book exposes the experience of a group of young writers working on the scripts of a TV series. Marquez ideas on good writing are diluted in the book; his suggestion that a good writer is measured by the amount of text he discards, rather than by how much is writing, is particularly inspiring. Another suggestion of the author is the astonishing statement that, in order to catch the reader, the writer shouldn't even start writing unless he believes he is better than Cervantes.

Italo Calvino's idea of literature is exposed in his posthumous essay "Lezioni americane" (i.e., "American lectures"), a collection of six lectures the Italian writer was supposed to give at Harvard (Cambridge, Ma); unfortunately, Calvino died before he could go to Harvard, but his wife Esther collected the notes into a book. The lectures are about the six qualities of literature Calvino believed could stand the new millenium, and thus define what good literature is about in his view. These six qualities are lightness, rapidity, exactness, visibility and multiplicity. According to the text, these six qualities should not only inform the activity of writers, but also guide "our unkempt, vague existence".