The Art of Writing

            All you need to start is one word. Just one. In fact, you don’t even need that – you could start with a single letter, although that is much more difficult if you don’t know what to follow it with.

            You take that one word – or letter, as the case may be – and follow it with another, stretching it out onto a sentence. If you want to get fancy, you can even add some punctuation, making it a compound sentence.

            Then, you do it again, adding a second sentence, then a third. (It is always a good idea to vary the sentence length.) Before you know it, you have a paragraph and you’re ready to do it all over again.

            Except, this time, the words and ideas are different. Just as the paragraph after that – and after that – are different.

            It doesn’t have to be perfect. The words can be changed later; the grammar fixed; the ideas altered. The act of writing is the important part. You aren’t chiseling it into stone – the details can always be changed.

            Just take it one step at a time – one word at a time. It happens faster than you think. You have a blog post. A chapter. A short story. A book.

            Writing is more than a skill. It is an art. It takes practice. It takes time. But when you’re finished, you have something you can be proud of – because, if you aren’t proud of it, that just means it isn’t finished yet.

            All it takes to start is one letter. One word. One sentence. From there, it grows and builds momentum until it is complete.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Anecdotes and Profoundness

            I decided that, this week, I should write something profound.

            Something profound.

            There, now that that’s out of the way, I can get on to other things, such as boring you with pointless anecdotes. Let’s just reach into my memory and pull one out. Ouchouchouch, I said a memory, not my whole brain!

            One feature that has defined me for my entire life is that I'm stubborn. Strong willed, my mother calls it. One thing I've always been a stickler about is only partaking in entertainment I enjoy. For this reason, I started saying of movies and books, “No swords, no magic – no good.” Now, my tastes aren't actually that strictly limited, but it’s a good starting point for understanding what I like.

            In grade 10, I ran into a bit of a problem with this. For the English curriculum, we were required to read and review three books throughout the semester. At least one needed to be fiction and one non-fiction. Wellll, I didn't really like that arrangement, so I did what I felt was the next best thing – I reviewed two fantasy novels and one science fiction. Close enough, right?

            After submitting the final review I waited and waited for the teacher to say something to me about it. She never did. I passed with flying colours and never had to worry about it. I always wondered if she hadn't noticed or if I was just such a great student that she’d let it slide (I still remember when she gave us a grammar quiz to see what we knew – I was the only one who got 100% and she was appalled at how lowly everyone else had scored, so she told me to read a book or do whatever I liked while she taught everyone else how to grammar).

            Two years later, I got the opportunity to ask her. You should have seen the look on her face! I’d managed to slide the fiction reviews past her without her noticing. I can’t remember exactly what she said to me, but I'm sure the word “sneaky” was used.

            The moral of the story is that teachers are busy and don’t have the time or memory to check on minor details, so read whatever you like. Although, I have to admit, the following year my grade 11 English teacher (who had been my Grade 10 Latin teacher and was currently my Grade 11 Latin teacher) put a lot of work in and managed to get me to read a non-fiction book – The Devils’ Horsemen, which was a wonderful book about Genghis Kahn.

            There, I've both shared an anecdote and said something profound. That makes a good blog, right? See you next week!

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.