Date: Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Time: 5:43 PM

My 1500 word story's development has died down slowly over the last couple of days . I now have new found respect for authors the world over! It's a lot of work and planning that goes into creating a book of any kind, but I think a fictional book is even harder to write.

When you write an essay, biography, or any other kind of non fiction work, you often have references of some kind. You already have a pre-existing structure for you writing at least to an extent. When you write fiction, you have to create everything from scratch. You have to invent people, places, events, and then convey them in writing in such a way that... other people could almost believe they are real. And the hardest, but most important person to convince, is your self. Because if you don't "know" the people, "see" the places, and "experience" the events ... your writing will be dead.

*sigh* Looks as though this blog entry will be a rant on my new found thoughts on writing. Boring? Probably. Worth doing anyways? Yes! I enjoy writing about my thoughts because it helps me to make sense of them. When we think, the thoughts are so brief and so hard to hold onto, that we often times don't manage to fully understand them. When we speak, write, and draw, we create something visual that we can refer back to ... challenge and try to look at from a third person point of view. We can think "If I heard someone else say this... what would I think? Does it make sense?"

My aunt sent me a very nice book of poems for my birthday, and as I was reading it I came across a poem that I i liked and thought I'd share.

War
by Ebenezer Elliott

The victories of mind,
Are won for all mankind,
But war wastes what it wins,
Ends worse than it begins,
And is a game of woes,
Which nations always lose:
Though tyrant tyrant kill,
The slayer liveth still.