Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Good Taste as a demotivator

Everyone can write.  Okay, my handwriting is terrible, but I can type.  And, I know the conventions and rules of grammar, the intended flow patterns of sentences and paragraphs and chapters.  I know the fine details like noun-verb agreement and the larger scale details of ...well, ... uh, maybe I don't know those so well.

But I do have experience with them.  In my twelve years of public schooling and *cough* years at university, I was steadily taught increasingly subtle and complex rules for writing.

I did not get that training in wood carving or photography or video producing.

I should add that my schooling included some creative writing but that dried up around grade ten.  After that, it was all persuasive or technical writing.  I have recently discovered how little I remember about writing dialog.  Does the comma go inside the quotes or outside?

Ah, anyway, although I am relatively new to creative writing, I have had a lot of training on the subject and I have read literally thousands of books so I have seen examples, both good and bad, of how to write.  I have my own preferences and taste.  And that is a problem now as I try to create my own content as Zen Pencils explains.

Click on the image to expand it and/or follow the link to see the whole comic.  But if you don't follow the link, you will never see even the above at the intended full size as I have deliberately shrunk it a little.

Nanowrimo is going well.  It is too early to make predictions, but I feel confident that I will complete the challenge of 50,000 words this month.  50,000 words of relatively poor quality. But all mine.

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