adamalcock

Beginning To Write

What is Writing and who can Write?

Writing, to a story writer, is the act of getting an idea into a story and then selling the story. You do not have to be a good writer to write, in fact you have to be a bad writer to start writing. JK Rowling, JRR Tolkien and Steven King did not wake up one morning and decide that they were going to be best-sellers. Writing is about practise and only through practise can a writer become great.

So anyone can be a writer, they just need to make the time to write and write a lot. With practise comes skill.

Starting Out

More than likely if you are reading this then you have already written a few short stories for school work or for leisure. For me, it was school what found my passion for writing. I had to do an assignment in English in year 8 (when I was 13/14) and from then on I have dedicated many days and weeks of my life to the practise of writing. I now write for leisure and hopefully one day, for money. Because that’s what the industries all about: Making money.

This trigger helped me a lot, more than likely you will have had a trigger point to make you want to write. If you haven’t had a trigger point yet I suggest you try out some stories from the story starters at the bottom.

The first piece

Your first piece of work will be terrible, but you will be proud of it because you have written it. This is an obvious truth which one day we must face, but through this first, terrible piece of work we can improve. We can look at it and show it others who can view it and comment on what was good and bad. We can only grow from being truthful and harsh with our work.

This was my first piece before the trigger. I liked writing at this point but wasn’t passionate. I was 8 years old.

quote:

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It was that night which startled me, I was astounded when I saw her. The creature was indescribable , and it was a horror to nature…IT WAS THE UNCEBARKER!The Uncebarker was lying on the ground , her shiny scales , once shiny blue now brown and ugly.
Her face was bleeding , as the dark bruises shadowed her eyes. The Uncebarker couldn’t go on. She dragged her heavy wings across the floor too a puddle of filthy water, she began to drink rapidly but some one interrupted her feed.
A gruff man entered the cave , he was wearing a black woolly and trousers, on his belt there was a whip and an iron cane.
“You stupid animal,” boomed Archemidis
“I’ll make money out of you yet,” he said again.
Archy withdrew his cane and with one bloodcurdling slash he whacked The Uncebarker.
“aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Well as you can see, its terrible but I learnt a few things from this. One is what I discussed earlier, only with practise can I become better. Another was that I had no understanding of story telling at all. It was random, I had no flow and I didn’t know where I was going. For years after I stayed in this threshold.

Assignment (Post your work as a comment) :

If you have a first piece, post it here. If you havnt then just write SOMETHING ( no more than 500 words). How to write will be started in the next class.

Story Starters:

A man falls in love with a woman, shortly after she snatches him away and tells him of a dark past.

A sorcerer from a distant land stumbles across a city ruin, he finds a small boy there and leads him to a forgotten civilisation

A man has a growing hatred for his brother over money, he follows him into the night and kills him.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 9:27 am and is filed under On Writing, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.