The beauty of writing.

I have recently started reading the book The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde - as I figured I needed to catch up with some canon texts I never got around to reading over the years.
Now, this isn't a review at all. I just wanted to tell you about something that really stood out to me. There was this one quote that put everything I'd ever written into perspective and made it seem amateurish. I felt like it even explained to me what I was perhaps doing wrong with my writing.
And today, I am going to share it with you. Perhaps you may even know what it is.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age where men treat art as if it were meant to be some form of auto-biography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Essentially what Wilde is trying to say is that writing about one's self isn't creating beauty. It is a self-serving confession of thoughts, feelings and desires.

See, there are many different kinds of artists. Painters, drawers, sculptors, musicians, actors... and of course, writers. Now, I know nothing about the theory of art. I do not know the schools of thought on this idea. What I do know is how I create what I do - be it a poem, or a letter, an essay, a journal entry, or a blog post. I create from what I know. Not because it's all I know, but because I can connect easily to it. There has to be a depth of connection for your work to really ever mean something. To be able to write about what has happened to me, to colourfully fabricate around it or even to write a history essay on a topic I find most interesting, is how I decide what to write next.

Thing is though - I haven't done much creative writing in a while. While I can organise my vocabulary to create creative descriptions of things, I haven't exercised the use of my imagination much in such a while. I think perhaps creating something new from scratch might challenge my inability to create beauty.

As I continue working on my script for the 2014 Melodrama (hopefully), I will be keeping this in mind.
For now, I shall be retiring to my warm bed so I can finally finish this book, and the three others I'm halfway through.

Good night readers,
         whoever you may be.