Writing Ain't Easy.
The Free Dictionary.com
Not that anyone ever said it was: but writing takes commitment.
I recommend that you read How to Quit Your Day Job to Write Full Time if you are, in fact, thinking of writing full-time. It mgiht be better to wait for that until you have the nice home, and the fancy car. Not to mention a decent home office set aside for writing. You need a printer, a computer (or typewriter, or both), notepads, notebooks, paper of all sorts. Strunk and White's Elements of Grammar is a good reference book to have. Eats, Shoots and Leaves is also a good book ot read. Punctuation is important, accurate punctuation doubly so.
The dictionary is your friend. Two or three are great! I have one that's so old, it's lost its paperback cover over the years since the 1970s, but it lists certain foreign words and phrases (I wrote a poem using it for inspiration once, that went into my campus literary magazine), mythological figures--lots of references that I have seen in no dictionary since then. I have large print, small print, and I have two online dictionaries bookmarked—more, if you count a couple of naming sites which let you look up various names in different languages by their meaning and intent.
A Jacuzzi Is Not A Mythological Creature (Thought It Sounds Like One). Yes, up until I was around eighteen, I had no idea what a jacuzzi was. I had no interest in them, seeing as I had no dealings with them. A lot of what we write, what we come to know, derives from our own experiences, and in what happens in our daily lives. "Write What You Know" doesn't mean that you should go out and write odes to a pencil sharpener (Although that sounds like fun, so maybe I will write one later). The nuance, the word choice, choosing representations—in fantasy, a car can become a dragon, especially on days when the engine gets overheated and the muffler decides to take a nap in the middle of the road while the rest of your car continues on, down the road. Er, well, things like that, yes. ;-)
From The Desk of Liz Ensley:
Not that anyone ever said it was: but writing takes commitment.
I recommend that you read How to Quit Your Day Job to Write Full Time if you are, in fact, thinking of writing full-time. It mgiht be better to wait for that until you have the nice home, and the fancy car. Not to mention a decent home office set aside for writing. You need a printer, a computer (or typewriter, or both), notepads, notebooks, paper of all sorts. Strunk and White's Elements of Grammar is a good reference book to have. Eats, Shoots and Leaves is also a good book ot read. Punctuation is important, accurate punctuation doubly so.
The dictionary is your friend. Two or three are great! I have one that's so old, it's lost its paperback cover over the years since the 1970s, but it lists certain foreign words and phrases (I wrote a poem using it for inspiration once, that went into my campus literary magazine), mythological figures--lots of references that I have seen in no dictionary since then. I have large print, small print, and I have two online dictionaries bookmarked—more, if you count a couple of naming sites which let you look up various names in different languages by their meaning and intent.
A Jacuzzi Is Not A Mythological Creature (Thought It Sounds Like One). Yes, up until I was around eighteen, I had no idea what a jacuzzi was. I had no interest in them, seeing as I had no dealings with them. A lot of what we write, what we come to know, derives from our own experiences, and in what happens in our daily lives. "Write What You Know" doesn't mean that you should go out and write odes to a pencil sharpener (Although that sounds like fun, so maybe I will write one later). The nuance, the word choice, choosing representations—in fantasy, a car can become a dragon, especially on days when the engine gets overheated and the muffler decides to take a nap in the middle of the road while the rest of your car continues on, down the road. Er, well, things like that, yes. ;-)
posted by Liz at 7:09 AM
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