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vollmusI love to write. When I can get my thoughts out on paper or on the computer screen, I feel so much better. I feel relieved, like some of the weight on my back and on my chest has just been dissipated. And once I've experienced this feeling of alleviation, I have to go back and make sure my writing is perfect; I check grammar, spelling (though sometimes I ignore it), vocabulary, and the feeling projected with each word and sentence. Once I am satisfied, I feel a sense of pride along with my previous relief. I wrote these words, and they sound relatively good together. It's amazing.
"Smart people learn from their own mistakes; the wise learn from the mistakes of others." I'm sure everyone has heard some variation of this before, and it is probably vaguely obvious to the reader what my point is now: I read fanfiction to see how people make mistakes in writing. It is often hard for me to learn what I shouldn't do by reading published material, as most of what I read is quality literature suggested by many people or forced on me by advanced english teachers, so I need to get this information somewhere else. Fanfiction is a genre of unpublished fiction that has an incredibly wide range of talent (or lack of it), and one of the most fascinating things about it is that nearly every piece improves with time. As the author writes more and more chapters -- chapters that generally increase in length as the story continues -- they receive advice in reviews and they gradually understand what works and what doesn't. What is wonderful about this understanding is truly the crawling speed of its coming; the revelation comes slowly but surely, and the reader is able to see "mistakes" in the beginning and how the author learns to correct them as the story continues. It is unlikely that the reader will make these same mistakes after seeing them in action, and if they do, there is an example in front of them, telling them how to fix each one.
I am a firm believer in this concept. I have absolute confidence that I am correct when I say that I am a better writer now than I was last year, the year before, or the year before that -- and my english teachers have had little to do with this improvement, as they've been teaching me basically the same things I've known since third grade over and over again. By reading so much unpublished literature, I have been exposed to multiple effective and abhorrent writing styles that show me what "works" and what does not. This has had an invaluable effect on my own style that could not have been achieved in any other way. There is no way I'm going to quit when I'm so far ahead in this lesson.
"Smart people learn from their own mistakes; the wise learn from the mistakes of others." I'm sure everyone has heard some variation of this before, and it is probably vaguely obvious to the reader what my point is now: I read fanfiction to see how people make mistakes in writing. It is often hard for me to learn what I shouldn't do by reading published material, as most of what I read is quality literature suggested by many people or forced on me by advanced english teachers, so I need to get this information somewhere else. Fanfiction is a genre of unpublished fiction that has an incredibly wide range of talent (or lack of it), and one of the most fascinating things about it is that nearly every piece improves with time. As the author writes more and more chapters -- chapters that generally increase in length as the story continues -- they receive advice in reviews and they gradually understand what works and what doesn't. What is wonderful about this understanding is truly the crawling speed of its coming; the revelation comes slowly but surely, and the reader is able to see "mistakes" in the beginning and how the author learns to correct them as the story continues. It is unlikely that the reader will make these same mistakes after seeing them in action, and if they do, there is an example in front of them, telling them how to fix each one.
I am a firm believer in this concept. I have absolute confidence that I am correct when I say that I am a better writer now than I was last year, the year before, or the year before that -- and my english teachers have had little to do with this improvement, as they've been teaching me basically the same things I've known since third grade over and over again. By reading so much unpublished literature, I have been exposed to multiple effective and abhorrent writing styles that show me what "works" and what does not. This has had an invaluable effect on my own style that could not have been achieved in any other way. There is no way I'm going to quit when I'm so far ahead in this lesson.
