Big Daddy has a post about writing, inspiration and style.
I’ve always loved writing. As a teenager, it was an outlet for timidity; as a young adult, an outlet for frustration. And as I approach middle age, it’s more of a means to let out the parts of myself that tend to frighten or confuse others in person.
My mom says that all of her children are good writers, but that I am the only one that seems to enjoy it.
Style? I speak in nearly the same manner as I write. If I read the written material aloud and it sounds good, onto the “paper” it goes.
The thing that writing does for me—and I know I’m not alone—is that it helps me flesh out what I’m thinking. If I have some vague “feeling” about a subject, instead of saying “I can’t put it into words,” I actually do put it into words. It helps me to put “feeling” in its proper place and to actively think. I’ve got a hard drive filled with illogical discarded “feelings.” (Some might say that I have blog filled with such. Oh well.)
If I were to list the number of writers, authors and novelists, that have influenced my style, I would likely bore myself to death, not to mention my readers. You’ll notice that, on my sidebar, I’ve listed favorite fiction. The list is not fixed—except for One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Dahomean--but merely some of the ones that I’ve read more than once, which is a great indicator of how much I enjoyed it. The fiction writer creates his/her own world. If that world is a place that I want to go back to, over and over again, then it's a winner.
AFTERTHOUGHT: The most handy writing tool is, taa daa! A dictionary. No, not a spell-checker, not an online dictionary, but a big, dead-tree dictionary. I keep a ten-year-old Webster’s Third under my desk: hardback, split into three volumes. It’s great but it’s strange how the letters in it keep getting smaller every year. ;-)
