If you can be misread, you will be

May 21, 2013 at 12:19 pm

Oh, how true this is! People love to read into what we write. They delight in finding the things that we didn’t mean to put in there, but that can be seen through someone else’s filter. And boy, can trouble result! Is it possible to avoid this? I guess extensive proof reading and editing will help, especially when multiple people are involved, as that will make sure it goes through the filters of several different minds as they apply their own perspective to what you wrote. But you’re never going to cover everybody. Can anything be done once you have […]

“The craft of the sentence is important. But a perfectly crafted sentence with no passion is a well-dressed corpse. More fun to dance with a beggar than kiss a corpse”

May 11, 2013 at 6:53 pm

I think this whenever I hear about people who complain that the ‘popular’ novel wasn’t really that good because it didn’t do this or that. It didn’t tick this box or underline that particular technique. But obviously it did something, because the public latched on to it and wouldn’t let go. And yes, I guess you could say that the public is mindless and many of them follow the latest trend just because it’s the latest trend, but there always has to be a leader to start it off, a mind who was engaged by that passion. So which is […]

Don’t say you’re trying to be a writer. If you’re writing then you are a writer. Publication is nice, but has nothing to do with the definition

May 7, 2013 at 12:28 pm

I have a lot of trouble living up to this statement. Even when I was the editor of a magazine and writing for it as well, I was too ashamed to call myself a writer, mainly because I didn’t have a degree that said I could write. It can be difficult to consider yourself a writer if you haven’t been published, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t. Earning a degree in writing doesn’t mean you are, either. After all, writers write, they don’t just have bits of paper saying they can do it. If you want to be a writer […]