Writing has been a part of my life for, oh, I'd say at least 40 years. Miss Hollins, my eighth grade English teacher, saw my potential after she asked the class to write short stories about anything that we felt would draw in a reader's interest.
Most students wrote one or two pages. My story was 26 pages long (in longhand, to boot!), single space, a murder mystery in a small town. So, I guess you could say I was hooked with storytelling. But in general, from short stories to poems, essays and the like, I wrote anything that made me happy and that I thought others would enjoy. Post university, I entered the world of journalism and have never looked back.
Which genre do I prefer? I don't have a preference. I love everything for various reasons. Poetry is music on paper and essays stimulate a world of opinion. As for journalism, I simply love the staccato-like reporting that news articles offer a reader. Snappy sentences that give you the nuts and bolts in the first paragraph and that pull you in to read the rest. Magazine articles are beautiful because they afford the writer the opportunity to add flair and colour to a story, such as sidebars that provide some extra meat.
Fundamental to all writing is grammar. With the Internet growing exponentially year after year (content often gets published without a second pair of eyes on it or because of odd sites that push such content), I see so many errors on so much copy that my eyes bleed (and it's not because I'm an editor!).
It all has to make sense, and this is where the editor comes in. This gives you a hint about what my next post will be about: editors and why they are extremely (objectively speaking, of course!) important.
Until next time…
I could not agree more: "...edit, edit, edit" as Strunk and White observe. I became interested in writing as a young child, and was writing movie reviews and social critique (of sorts) by ten. Eighth grade, too, for me was a watershed year. Girls suddenly were blossoming before my eyes, and I had to write them songs and poems in tribute to their beauty.
I now teach English, to the shock of my former teachers perhaps, or perhaps not. Maybe they saw that I was a proto-teacher/writing junkie before I did.
Like in your case Zoe, I argue it takes one to know one.
Thank you for sharing this post with us.