I remember writing as one of my earliest interests as a child, together with reading. I learnt to read and write at the age of three. My mother was... ![]() my teacher until the age of six when I went to regular school. When I did, the class teacher advised my parents that I was too advanced for Year 1 and I should be moved to Year 2. For reasons to me unknown, my parents declined, and I continued to frequent Year 1. As the teacher predicted, I got regularly bored with the curriculum, and this boredom continued at least until Year 3 when we got introduced to more compelling content. In the meantime, away from school, I fed my reading appetite with large banquets of literature. My first memories of self-reading are of the Childcraft encyclopedia. It was a collection of fifteen volumes created in an easy-to-understand format for children that would range from nursery rhymes to classic fairy tales to scientific know-how pieces and later it would cover medical information on the body's functions and child development. It's through these volumes that my imagination opened up, and I discovered things like poetry, rhyming, and changing tone and style depending on the subject. At the age of 9, I was allowed to sign up for my very own library card. It felt both an achievement and a big responsibility, one that I enjoyed very much. I started to borrow more and more books. Luckily for me, as most kids growing up in the 80s, my parents didn't care too much about what I read or played with, so after devouring all the youth classics from the giants of literature like Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Alexander Dumas, Jules Verne and many others, a couple of years down the line, I crossed the boundary of more adult fiction.
When I was 11 or 12, I used to watch Japanese mangas TV series. There was one in particular that I was fond of, but I didn't like how they had written it. So I made my version. I changed the name of the protagonists, kept some elements of the original story, and developed a brand new one. It was a full-on task, I typed everything: 136 pages, on my mother's typewriter. Page after page, the characters developed into a story that I was much happier with. After that, I made some copies of the manuscript and sold them at school. Entrepreneurial much?
Later, from my 20s onwards I swapped fiction stories for real ones. I developed an interest for biographies, and later on, I expanded on a variety of subjects that went from philosophy and human studies to technology. You may be wondering how all this information is linked to writing if I've been mostly mentioning reading. It's quite simple, without reading, there is no writing. If you wish to become a writer or a better writer, you need to become a reader or a better reader first. Reading will not only help you gaining knowledge and expand your vocabulary, but it also helps you understand different tones and styles. Read up various types of content, and you'll notice the copy from a print advert differs from an online one. Copy for an infomercial differs from an editorial article. FMCG brands adopt a different tone compared to luxury brands. A travel company uses keywords that are distinct from a car's brand, and so on. So, the recipe is as simple as reading, observing, and practicing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
September 2017
Categories |