A brief intermission

A personal introduction and summary of the philosophy of the course.

I hope you enjoyed the last lesson about ponies. If you didn't get the joke, then I'm going to have to recommend that you stop reading this immediately, as you are probably in my "I'm going to make fun of you" demographic.

The lessons of this course are not intended to be taken as strict guidelines for writing, nor are they meant to contradict the rules just for the sake of being defiant. I'm not trying to give you a step-by-step tutorial of how to write exactly like me. I write like me. You write like you. This course provides a philosophy about writing designed to help you find your own style without limiting yourself to the ideas and opinions of others. Every once in a while I give advice that most scholars and professors have given for years. This is usually by accident, and only because I agree that it really is good advice. And sometimes the lessons cover things that the same professors would undoubtedly recommend against. In all of these cases, I'm illustrating a technique that I use and how I've made it work according to my own intuitive system of logic. If someone says don't do something because of [x], where x is the established reason of why something is unacceptable, you must first evalute the relative truth of x. If it doesn't apply in a certain situation, the rule is forfeit and it should be left to the author's judgment.  

Many of these lessons reflect my own style of writing and my reasons for doing it that way. I am a self taught writer, and I've only been writing fiction for about three years, give or take. But I've been a storyteller all my life, and that's what dictates my writing style above all else. I started reading heavily at a young age, everything from science and history to folklore and mythology. When I was twelve my holy trinity of fiction authors was Clive Barker, H.P. Lovecraft, and Douglas Adams. Yeah. I read The Hellbound Heart when I was f*****g twelve years old. That shouldn't even be legal.

By age sixteen I discovered sex and drugs. So reading kinda went out the window for the next ten years or so.

Anyway, after graduating from Art School (my passion since childhood, long before I considered writing), I took a seven year hiatus from being productive in order to have what we writers euphemistically call "life experience," much of it in strip clubs or on acid.

But now I write s**t. So I guess my closing piece of advice is find your voice and go write s**t.

Comments

Mike Lamb

Posted 14 Years Ago Roarke...one more outburst like that and you will be tossed in a meat grinder and fed to the ponies, apple and all.

roarke

Posted 14 Years Ago But where are the ponies? Now if your going to go all soft and mushy on us and start being sentimental, I'm gonna have ta take ya's into the parking lot and use a floor buffer on ya. Wax on wax off style. Like in a Brazilian wax. In the music biz, there's a saying, "you're only as good as your last gig." This when 'giants walked the earth' stuff is for old codgers like me. Most "accredited" personages I know have their collective heads buried where they sit. If you're not out there doing it, in full battle royale (not to be confused with a le royal french Macdonald's burger) then you don't know jack bananas. It's the battle, the scars and scalps that learn ya somethin'. I sure hope so anyways 'cause I'm runnin' outta bandages.... So, teach, what am I supposed to do with the apple I brung for the ponies?

Mike Lamb

Posted 14 Years Ago note* I am not advocating drug use.