"There is no motivation higher than being a good writer."
What makes a good writer? It seems like the rules are constantly changing. Don't start a scentance with "and" or "but". Don't use fragments, never, not ever. Not even for creative dramatic effect. But still be creative, still douse the pages with the inner workings of your mind, a mind that doesn't always make sense or compute millions of floating fragments of thoughts into perfect 12 point times new roman sentences. No, words come out of my brain as a jumbled mess of thought that I then rearrange and reshape and cut down and dilute until there's nothing remotely close to what I am left in them. And sometimes even that's a little too outside the box.
In high school I asked my English teacher why I couldn't write my short stories in the rich yet sparse full of swirling emotion fragmented genius way of Junot Diaz. She told me to come back when I had a Pulitzer prize and that until then I had to follow the rules. But Junot Diaz didn't. None of the Greats did. So I don't either in the hopes that maybe one day I can be great, and if not, I'll be content knowing that that my writing is me.
-EB
What makes a good writer? It seems like the rules are constantly changing. Don't start a scentance with "and" or "but". Don't use fragments, never, not ever. Not even for creative dramatic effect. But still be creative, still douse the pages with the inner workings of your mind, a mind that doesn't always make sense or compute millions of floating fragments of thoughts into perfect 12 point times new roman sentences. No, words come out of my brain as a jumbled mess of thought that I then rearrange and reshape and cut down and dilute until there's nothing remotely close to what I am left in them. And sometimes even that's a little too outside the box.
In high school I asked my English teacher why I couldn't write my short stories in the rich yet sparse full of swirling emotion fragmented genius way of Junot Diaz. She told me to come back when I had a Pulitzer prize and that until then I had to follow the rules. But Junot Diaz didn't. None of the Greats did. So I don't either in the hopes that maybe one day I can be great, and if not, I'll be content knowing that that my writing is me.
-EB
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