The Writing Life
A few weeks ago, The Next Web published an article about the brutal truths of the creative life. I enjoyed the article so much that I decided to approach each of the eleven truths in individual posts. The first truth: no one’s ideas are original.
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Glottal sounds and appears to be an odd word choice. It certainly wasn’t the first word to come to mind when I started the latest installment in the Alphabet Adventure. Other words, like seashells left after the tide’s retreat, surfaced: glory, grand (related: grandiose and grandeur), garbage, glint (presumably because of Irc, a crow in the Pellinor series), and gainsay.
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Flibbertigibbet sounds like “bibbidi-bobbidi-boo” or “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” The sound is appropriate, considering that flibbertigibbet means a silly or flighty person. All three phrases convey a sense of the nonsensical and the downright “atrocious.” (Thank you, Mary Poppins.)
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“There are different questions that an aspiring artist can ask.
“One question is, ‘What must I do to be famous?’
“This question will open up a writer to all manner of destructive forces both within and without. We’ve all seen it play out.
“A different question, and one asked much less often is, ‘What must I do to make this sustainable?’
“Songwriting, painting, acting, writing—these are all crafts that one can practice over the course of a lifetime. You can get better — grow — for a long, long time.”
— Linford Detweiler, Over the Rhine
“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’” — Maya Angelou
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Some books fail to transcend the young adult fantasy genre. Others differ. Because of that — or maybe because I simply desire a good story, language, and imagery — I try to not to pay too much attention to whether I’m reading “young adult” or “adult” novels.
[Read more…] about Twelve Young Adult Fantasy Novels to Read as an Adult