Comrades

The writer is a strange person. Not everyone can claim that they were not lonely after five or six hours of solitary writing. Not everyone gets up at excruciatingly early times in the morning to write with the rising sun, or stays up late, watching the waning moon while their fingers pound away on a keyboard. In fact, so strange are these individuals that they are often bred from soil which does not understand them. This is how I felt growing up, I only had one friend who was a fellow writer and we were closer than any describable bond. Eventually I moved away and found myself surrounded by people, including my family, who could not understand my odd ways, eccentric habits, and all those other fun phrases I could say that mean essentially the same things. I could not discuss story plots, nor stories and how they were written.
 Then, one fateful day I came and visited Taylor University and sat in on their Professional Writing Class. Instantly I felt a connection with everyone in that room, which was filled with nods as the speaker discussed how many people say you can't make a living at writing. Now that I am here, however, the comrade feeling is all the greater. We gathered together and talked as a group, there is a planned dinner where we all sit together, and tomorrow my classes with my comrades start! I also found out that you can start a conversation with any writer by just mentioning what book you're reading. The feeling and understanding found between writer and writer is fascinating. I look forward to finding out more about it.

Speed

At times my writing comes from mind to fingers to text really fast. Some call this "inspiration" or "flow," but either way it comes to writers at times and at other times it does not. For me, when it comes my plot also goes faster than I think it should. This is a difficulty and one that I have yet to find a solution for. Perhaps there is no solution. I am currently struggling with this sort of problem in The Chosen Three. I believe I will go to bed and sleep on it. Start back up later and see if the plot can't be slowed a bit.

College

Getting packed and ready for college plus working 30 hrs this week...PLUS being a procrastinator is a terrible decrement to writing. Writing takes perseverance, but this week the few hours of it I've gotten in were very unproductive. The text came from my fingers like a bland monologue, but the ideas and story are still good. I'm just having trouble producing them into imagery and good writing this week. It sucks, there's nothing worse than a writer having good ideas and not being able to find the right words to place them down in.  Luckily, the first drafts of every story is not written in stone, otherwise we'd all be reading rather abhorrent outlines and monologues. 

Stealing Souls

Look at the title...it is rather interesting for a first post, but that's the way my mind works. I suppose I should explain the rather devious title. I have taken up a habit, one that involves 'stealing souls', as I call it. I carry around a small notepad in my back pocket and when I hear some interesting phrase or talk to a person whose general character traits amuse or intrigue me, I write down the phrase or make a overview of the certain character. I then archive these characters and phrases to use in my writing. It is a very amusing habit as I've run into some phrases such as, "fine as a frog fart."
As I read Jerry Jenkins, Writing for the Soul, I came across this quote, "novelists who think fiction is easier because they can just make everything up will soon find readers disinterested." This quote made me dig into the characters all around me even more. You see, I had realized that if I took real life traits and introduced them into an entirely different world it would produce a familiarity between the reader and what he is reading. This is probably the greatest revelation concerning writing that I obtained from Jenkins' book.