"Cowardice asks the question...is it safe? Expediency asks the question...is it politic? Vanity asks the question...is it popular? But conscience asks the question...is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because it is right." ~Dr. Martin Luther King

Wednesday 19 May 2010

Whoa !!!

It's a comment from One Who Knows.

It's high time you stop wasting your precious time with the pea brains and put that pen of yours to something worth while , Like an autobiography, it would be an over night sensation and #1 best seller
Go for it!!

It's an interesting piece of advice.. I can take it two ways:

Stop writing stuff that isn't worthwhile....or

Stop writing stuff that isn't worthwhile and tell us the story of your life.

But I am telling you bits and pieces of it here and there. Anybody who writes is telling the reader everything about themselves. Soon you will know everything I know about myself.

In reading, there's nothing to distract; no beguiling smile, sparkling blue eyes or riveting gaze out of a sea of wrinkles.

Only the words.

I love words. I know I can put them together. I like to do it. I always watch writers being interviewed. I listen for the secret that reveals how to create fiction.

I know it's like building a house. Still I don't. I have no interest in creating fiction.

I am a chronicler.

Is that a word?

It is now.

They say; write about what you know.I do that.

Other things I do are similar. I write first thing in the morning. Three or four hours go by without my noticing.

I wrote when I was very young. Letters mostly; to my brother who went away to a seminary when he was eleven and I was seven. They were never sent. I never had a penny for a stamp.

In Primary 3, first class after the summer; Sister Eugenius told us to write about where we went for holidays.

We hadn't left home. .The shore was close. Most days, my sister and I were there together. I don't know where our mother went. Probably to our grandmother's house.

Anyway, the only thing I could think to write about was a movie I saw. The title was Four Feathers I've seen it again since. It' s a classic.

We'd been taught a line of poetry was a good way to end a composition.

I finished with a line from A Babbling Brook by Alfred Lord Tennyson .

"For men may come and men may go but I go on forever"

I was pleased with the composition. I didn't have to struggle. It was several pages long.

It was returned to me with a sniff and the comment; "the poem isn't suitable"

I was eight years old and already conscious the teacher assumed everyone would have been away on vacation.

I have no idea why she thought that.

Nobody I knew ever knew a writer.

Nobody talked about what they would like to be when they grew up. No-one asked or made suggestions.

My sister desperately wanted to be somebody else.She was two years older than I was. I had to play her pretend game.

I bet if I had ever thought or said I would like to be a writer, I would have had that knocked out of me pronto. I don't mean physically. There are many ways to put a child down.

In Aurora I wrote letters to the editor. Then I wrote a weekly column for eleven years.

But I had to wait until Blog came into my life.for things to happen the way they should. Opportunity presented itself. You have to know it when you see it.

My immediate objective now is to acquire the thingy that stores posts. independent of the computer.

I think I am writing a book. At some point, I will sort the posts into order and publish.
My computer is always inviting me to do that at $14.95 a pop.

Maybe I'll do one before the election.

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