Friday, January 29, 2010

Lightning. Bugs.

Imagine that you have a friend who really wants to be a writer. He carries books about writing with him everywhere. He eats what he thinks writers eat, he reads what he thinks writers read, and he goes to hear writers speak about their work whenever he gets a chance. Will he become a writer?

Never.

Unless he actually does the activity of writing.

Writers WRITE. They are willing to put words on a page to see whether they sound good together.

Writers MAKE MISTAKES. Sometimes they fail to achieve what they set out to do. But they don't care. Because the whole time they are writing, they know that what they are writing can easily be changed. So, no worries, right?

Writers RE-VISE. The beautiful thing about the written word is that it is so easy to change those words until you love the music of them. Mark Twain said, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." Powerful phrase! But catching lightning bugs is sort of fun, so enjoy the process of catching them until you feel the lightning cause your spine to tingle.

YOUR TASKS:

  1. You will post a minimum of one of your pieces per week on this site. When you do that, you will have to act as an administrator of the blog and sign in. Put your name at the bottom of the piece.
  2. You will also be required to comment on three people's pieces per week. When you do that, you will NOT sign in as an administrator. You will just read the piece and post a comment.
  3. Go catch some bugs...and don't be surprised if you feel some electric shocks.
  4. Please try leaving a comment. Click on comment. Write your comment, SIGN IT. Then, click on POST COMMENT and ANONYMOUS. Let's see if this works.