Okay so a couple of really great sites to share with you tonight.
Why you should is an offshoot of Medium.com, which is a collection of essays pertinent to modern life. I like the fact that they tell you how long a read each one is. I loved Why you should write by Drew Hoolhorst and will be copying the entire thing into my journal tonight. I hope you enjoy the site as much as I have.
… it should be enough to know that when you write something, anything, it’s like a lottery ticket. Someone could read it and could laugh uncontrollably for the best of reasons. Someone could read it and become violently angry at your view on something (or your “non-view” for that matter). Someone could read it and feel absolutely nothing.
And any one of those things is spectacular.
And then we come to Brain Pickings. This is a website that offers a weekly digest of great articles. And they recently published an article called Why I Write: George Orwell’s Four Universal Motives of Writing and Creativity by Maria Popova. Now I have read the original Orwell essay years ago but I still found this article interesting, especially because the amount of great info in the first paragraph alone will keep me copying into my journal for a week!
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
inlovewithjournals 