"Not For Robots" by Laini Taylor

I used to think that I hated writing. In high school, whenever I had a writing assignment (a paper or story), it would take me FOREVER to put anything down on paper. I had pretty severe writer's block and I would end up pretty exhausted by the time I was through with the dumb thing.

But after randomly finding this site, everything made sense. Simply put, I'm just a perfectionist. Like Taylor says, I find writing "both glorious and maddening, necessary and impossible, dazzling and stupifying." In other words, people who find writing easy more than likely don't work as hard at it as those who find it hard and work hard in order to obtain their desired grade. (For those of you who find writing papers easy AND get good grades on them, I envy you.)

Even if you don't think about writing in those extremes, this is a pretty interesting and somewhat entertaining site. First, she talks about her personal story as someone who always dreamed of being a writer, but never really got to it because of how difficult it is to actually sit down and force yourself to do it. Proceeding it is a series of blogs that are meant to be helpful for writers, such as "ideas and brainstorming," "exploratory drafts," "some important decisions," "methods to my madness," "hardwork & revisions," and "getting published." Her ideas are really easy and amusing to read. She uses a lot of quotes and helpful metaphors, such as relating brainstorming ideas to a "seed." Taylor is also very relatable, using her own experiences writing to walk you through her advice.

Probably my favorite part of the website is the giant list of insightful quotes that run down the right side of the page. Here is a list of some of my favorites:

"A writer is someone to whom writing is more difficult than it is to other people."- Thomas Mann

"The only way [the book can be written] is to set the unbook -- the gilt-framed portrait of the book -- right there on the altar and sacrifice it, truly sacrifice it. Only then may the book, the real live flawed finite book, slowly, sentence by carnal sentence, appear."-Bonnie Friedman

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."-Mark Twain

"Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But far better to write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."-Katherine Mansfield

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."- Chekhov



I recomend taking a look at this site. It's like a blog, so it's pretty easy to read, to the point, and really laid back. Simply put, she allowed me to see the act of writing in a new light. The expression of language is really hard!