Words to Live By

Today marks the official start of me blogging, and I hope that this is the first of many more to come.
I guess the first question to answer would be who am I and why have I decided to start blogging?
Well here's a bit about me:
My name is Hannah and I'm currently a sophomore at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.  I'm a Creative Writing Major with a Minor in Art&Design.  I'm hoping that, through this blog, I can share my ideas about lots of things (Music, Movies, TV, Books etc), but most of all about Creative Writing.  Creative Writing is something I've always loved, but sometimes life becomes far too hectic, and it's hard to find time to write.  So I hope that by chronically all of this I can not only keep my inspiration turned on but yours as well!

So welcome to The Light Switch!

I keep this journal by my computer.  It's a very nice journal with a metal inlay of dragonflies on the cover, and at one point it held my innermost thoughts. It might not hold my innermost thoughts anymore, but it does hold a very special purpose. It is my quote book. You see, when I was in the 10th grade my English teacher had us do a project. We had to pick quotes from Emerson and Thoreau and put them onto a poster board with pictures that detail what the quote means. We also had to explain why we chose the quote and what it meant to us.  I probably took the assignment way to seriously (my poster held 16 quotes and about a hundred pictures), but ever since then I've fallen in love with quotes.  So now I keep this book, which is much more compact than a poster. Whenever I come across a quote I like or that resonates with me, I write it down. Sometimes I go searching for quotes and sometimes they come to me.  They don't always have to be serious--I've got quotes from TV shows that are just particularly funny to me in there. I find it to be a solid source of inspiration, so here are some of the quotes I've found on Writing:

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." -Tom Clancy
If something doesn't make sense in a book, people throw a fit. If something doesn't make sense in real life, people might ask questions, but it's reality.  I love this. You can have as many plot holes in reality as you want, but everything in fiction has to be explained.


"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."- Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is something we've been talking about in my American Lit class as of late.  In fact that's how this quote happened to come to me.  Fiction is able to show extreme truth that people over look in real life.  People just don't pay attention enough in real life to always see these details, but when presented them in the form of a metaphor such as fiction, it opens itself for a new understanding.

"How vain is it to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!"- Henry David Thoreau
This fits into the whole "write what you know" category. How can someone sit down to write about life when they haven't experienced anything? If you want realistic characters, go out and meet people. If you want realistic sounding dialogue, listen in on peoples conversations as they walk by you.  It's as simple as that.

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."-Albert Einstein
Okay, so this isn't specifically about writing, but still holds true. Well I don't condone plagiarism, but the truth is no story is truly original anymore. Everything can be melted down to the basic archetypal plot. What is Star Wars but another Hero's Journey. It's the same with Harry Potter.  It isn't about coming up with something so completely original that no one's ever thought of it before; it's about twisting up what's already there to make it interesting again. I mean, look at how Stephanie Meyer butchered the idea of vampires.

 "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."-Cyril Connolly
Once again, this quote rings so true to me.  I feel like it all boils down to "if you love what you do, you'll never work a day." If you have an audience in mind, that's fine, but you should always write for yourself.  If you don't, you'll hate writing.  I mean there's a reason that "As You Like It" isn't one of Shakespeare's greater artistic plays. It has often been believed he wrote is as crowdpleaser, hence the title As You Like It.  It is far better to love what you write and want to write than to simply write to be accepted or famous. I've seen people (mostly tweens) on forums who think that writing is something that will get them famous or rich. Well you can become famous or rich, the odds aren't likely.  This is why you must write for the sheer joy of writing.


"Learn as much by writing as by reading."-Lord Acton
"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or tools to write."-Stephen King
These two ultimately say the exact same thing: if you don't read, how can you write?  I love books. LOVE THEM. It's part of my inspiration. I always want to write something after I've been reading a really good book. How can someone call themselves a writer if they refuse to read the work of their peers?

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."-Stephen King
I love love love love LOVE this quote because I hate it when people go thesaurus searching.  Someone actually did this recently in my creative writing class.  Her word was cacophonous, and it threw me off in the first two sentences.   I asked two people and then look it up in the dictionary to figure out what exactly it meant.  Now, I had been able to guess a little at the meaning of the word by the context, but the word was so exceptionally different than the rest of the language in the short story.  When I told her the word had thrown me off and asked why she'd used it, she told me she had "wanted a different word for noisy."  Well I find this a respectable reason to search through a thesaurus, but please pick a word you already know.  I try to only consult a thesaurus when I find I've used a word to many times in a row.  If you didn't know the word to begin with, please just don't use it.