I am not at all interested in becoming a professional fiction writer -- professional technical writer, sure, but not a professional fiction writer. In fact, I haven't taken an English class or read a non-children's book since high school. Thus, I am not well read and do not have a good vocabulary (my SAT scores reflected that, but somehow on the GRE, I got a lot of medical vocabulary words, so I did well). Honestly, having my head full of so many equations and medical terms, I don't exactly want to inncrease my other vocabulary. I often think that people that use big words in coversation are trying to show everyone else that they know big words. Some of the most intelligent people I know use small, common words in both conversation and professional presentation, but use them effectively -- I will admit that I have not perfected the craft of speaking and writing effectively yet.
Therefore, although I know the word behemeth, I would stop and question it as a word that isn't commonly used if I saw it in a story. I admit, that I have a college degree and think I know the mening of "terse", but I am not entirely sure. So I try to stick to small words when I write -- and speak. And, yes, I use a lot of adjectives.
Does that make me a bad writer? Probably. Do I care? Not at all. This is something I do for fun -- as a stress relief from my hectic RL. Therefore, I write stories I would like to read -- not caring at all about sentance structure or wordiness as I get my ideas down on paper.
Okay, I care a little that if someone points something out as being a really weird way to say something, I want that input, but I don't care enough to sit with a writing book and analyze each of my sentances. My dad almost has a PhD in English, so he has a ton of writing books sitting around the house somewhere, but I have never once looked at any of them. Well, because that would be boring. I have plenty of boring books of my own that I actually *have* to read
. Hmm, "Textbook of Medical Physiology", "Ion Channels of Excitable Membranes", "Textbook of Biomedical Instrumentation", "From Neuron to Brain", and "Principles of Neural Science" are just the five books on my bed right now waiting for me to open them. Thus, I don't really have the time, energy, or passion to read anything about the craft of writing. If I were at my office and did a poll, I would bet 100% of the other students there would know the titles and authors of all of the books I mentioned . . . I'm sure the percentage of the people who would have ever heard of "Skunk and White" or the word "behemouth" would be under 50%.
I have to admit, my attention span for reading things I am not interested in is so short, I stopped reading the article here after a few sentances and just skipped to the responses.
I think the point I was trying to make here is that while some writers are using fanfic as a stepping stone to write professionally, for others, that is the last thing on our minds.
- Laura
