I’ve mentioned it numerous times before on this blog: I am a highly linear, practical, left-brained type of person.
I’ve also on this blog called myself a writer.
Guess that makes me a left-brained writer.
Right?
Author Archives: Janna G. Noelle
My Writing Journey – finale
Continued from Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4:
England’s Parliament building and Big Ben shot from the London Eye, in the rain (Photo: J. Noelle).
I told myself it would be best to take a short break from writing – just until I’d had a chance to settle into my new job and home, and establish myself socially.
That “break” lasted six years.
They say that love is blind. I’d like to submit my own saying: love can make you stop writing. Especially when it is unrequited love. For my time away from writing my novel did indeed involve unrequited love, as well as obsession of an entirely different sort, rivalry, a joking/not joking threat of getting shoved off a boardwalk, and is practically a novel in its own right.
I’m not going to discuss it in any detail, for though it was a significant experience in my life that would go on to shape many things to come and perhaps even still does, it’s not a part of my “story” that I wish to continue living and carrying around with me.
I will concede that it was a time that allowed me to develop other interests, skills, and facets of my personality. Yet my pursuit of all that stuff (not to mention “the guy”) was no less balanced than when I was deep in the throes of Obsessive Writer’s Disorder – writing nonstop during meals and when I should have been sleeping.
All that’s in the past.
This is the future.
The Answer to an Even Bigger Question
Rule of Engagement 3.2
I love numbers.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not some sort of mathematician. I’m not even all that adept at numerical manipulation: in restaurants, like many, I struggle to calculate my portion of a group bill, and to also figure out an appropriate gratuity, and somewhat typical of my generation, I generally can’t perform long division in my head unlike the many people of my parents’ generation who can.
Still, though, numbers hold a place in my heart, or at least, the idea of numbers does, as does what they represent. For in numbers, I see a concrete means of comparing two or more different states of being: how something is to how it could or should be; how something is to how it was previously; where something started and where it ends.
In short, numbers can be used to monitor change and – more importantly – progress.
And what writer isn’t interested in that?
My Writing Journey, pt. 4
The Answer to the Big Question
Rule of Engagement 3.1
Back in 2002, I decided to take a much more serious approach to my writing and the pursuit of publication than I had to date. I then began searching for a way to convey this change of status to others in a manner that was both concise and wouldn’t misrepresent the true extent of my skills and achievements.
In short, I wanted to know if it was okay to start calling myself a “writer”.
In (Sorta) Support of Fan Fiction – finale
(Continued from Part 1, Part 2 – The Good, Part 3 – The Bad, and Part 4 – The Ugly)
Conclusion
Love it or hate it, fan fiction is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future.
In (Sorta) Support of Fan Fiction, pt. 4
(Continued from Part 1, Part 2 – The Good, and Part 3 – The Bad)
The Ugly
Look at how young they were back then.
So, let’s talk about sex, shall we. No discussion of fan fiction is complete without it.
In (Sorta) Support of Fan Fiction, pt. 3
(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2 – The Good)
The Bad
We all know that feeling (and, no, the Enterprise smells just fine).
I began this examination of fan fiction in response to two online articles I stumbled across on the subject on the same day: one from Time and the other found here at Flavorwire.com. I felt inclined to throw in a bit of support for fan fiction given that I started out in my youth as a fanfic writer – something I believe has helped me develop into the writer of original fiction that I am today.
In my first two posts, I reminisced about fun times spent writing in fandoms with friends, and also looked more closely at why writing fanfic can be educational for developing writers, yet why one shouldn’t assume that all fanfic writers are developing writers.
My goal for this series of posts, however, in the same vein as both of the aforementioned online articles, is to be balanced. So, having already covered the good of fan fiction, we now come to the bad.
In (Sorta) Support of Fan Fiction, pt. 2
(Continued from Part 1)
The Good
I was in grade 11 when I took my first, much-loved, creative writing class. Except, I don’t actually believe that was my first class. I think writing fan fiction gave me a far earlier education in writing craft.
I truly do believe this, for writing fanfic offered me ready-made access to what is often the most difficult part of a story to devise from scratch.
Characters.
In (Sorta) Support of Fan Fiction
Introduction – Fanfic and Me
There is a saying I’ve heard, generally among those much more believing in grand Universal plans than me, that if you cross paths with the same stranger three times in a single day than you were meant to meet that person.
I haven’t met any dashing strangers of late. But one day last week, I did three times come across a topic I don’t generally have much to do with: that of fan fiction (fanfic for short), that is, fan-written stories that star the characters and settings of copyrighted creative works.
Janna G. Noelle 