For the Love of Reading

E. L. Doctorow once said, “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.   Going to college bears a very similar process because you come in, blind to what you should expect and as you advance further, you learn not only through the world of academia, but you discover what makes you who you are. In college, I discovered that writing is what makes me who I am. Writing has always been a creative outlet for me to express how I think and feel, even when everything else seems to fail. There is something profound about getting it all down on paper and putting your heart out there on display for all to see.   I believe that writers have the ability to feel and express emotions differently than anyone else because their words and their writing make them vulnerable to their readers. Every time a writer creates a piece, they are putting their ideas, thoughts, emotions, and heart out there on display, hoping to get a positive response from their perspective reade...

  The Writing Process   1. The Book Idea  a. Develop a book idea that you are not only interested in, but that you are passionate about. You need to have a desire for the topic or subject matter you are writing about in order to be able to write a full-length book 2. Research, Research, and More Research  a. Research is a key part of developing a book idea and having the book concept reach its full potential.  b. Read alot;  Reading allows us to see how others, besides ourselves, use the basics of writing, which are grammar, language, and structure.  c. Questions you must ask yourself are:  i. Can I write extensively about this idea?  ii. Can this topic evolve into a full-length book?  iii. Who do I want to read this book?  iv. Who is my target audience  3. Create a detailed outline for the content of the book  a. A detailed outline allows you to lay out sequence of the book and see if the flow of e...

When I was in high school, everyone had different hobbies. Some people liked art and   drawing,  while others liked sports. I was different though because my nose was always buried in a book. From the moment I got home from school to that moment when I couldn’t possibly keep my eyes open any longer, I could be found reading. There were days where I could finish a 400-page book in a matter of hours. My mom would even come in some nights and tell me to put the book down and go to bed. I would just get lost in the story and the lives of the characters, that I would simply forget about the world around me. It’s always a great feeling when you can escape the reality of the world you live in to a place that comes alive on the pages in front of you. In my opinion, when a reader can relate to the characters and feel the emotions the author is trying to convey, that is what makes the author successful. A book is supposed to be a place where a person can go and just let their imaginatio...

Have you ever just found something annoying? Like so annoying that it gets under your skin, makes you cringe, or is just downright wrong? I think everyone has pet peeves or things that bother them so much, that you just want to say, “Can you just stop already?”  Here are five of the most irritating book pet peeves: When you get lost in a book only to have it end poorly Okay, so have you ever got so completely lost in a book? I mean so lost that you lose track of time. So lost you can’t even remember what day it is. Good books will definitely have this effect on you, but it is the absolute worse when you dedicate all this time and energy to one story, only to have it end badly. For example, you get so attached to a character and the author decides to kill them off in the end or the book has a great climax and level of suspense and in the end it just plateaus. Boring...  When this happens, I often feel deceived. Books, one of the things I love most, just betrayed and broke my tr...

Before starting as a college freshman four years ago, I dreaded the thought of reading and writing poetry. In my mind, poetry was this mysterious genre that didn’t have a clear and blatant message. It was up to the reader to determine what the writing meant. I kept thinking, “What is the point? What is the point if the author can’t pick out or notice the moral or the meaning behind the writing when they initially read it?”    I later realized that is the whole point of poetry. It is meant to be beautifully ambiguous, so that its readers can determine what it means for themselves. There are always more than one way to interpret well-written poetry.    So, I thought I would try a little exercise for this post, and I am going to do a short interpretation/analysis of the poem  Florist’s Root Cellar  by Theodore Roetheke. I see the theme of this poem as Survival/Struggle because of lines 9-11.  “Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks. Nothin...

Who out there loves to read? Okay, well that might be a silly question considering you are reading this article on a book lovers’ blog. The real question is... Who out there loves to read, but feels like they never have time to actually sit down and read?  This is one of the major things that I have been struggling with since I started as a Freshman in undergrad. It was, hands down, one of the biggest changes I went through because books went from being a huge part of my life to being nonexistent because of my busy, rigorous schedule. The crazy thing is, even when I had free time during my college years, I rarely found myself picking up a book for pleasure. Why? I had a hard time picking up a book to read for my own enjoyment because I had just been required to read all these books that I wasn’t exactly thrilled or excited about reading for college.  It really wasn’t until the global outbreak of COVID-19 and the shutdown, where I took the time out of my day to read again. Redi...

Have you ever thought about why we can connect and relate to the books we read? Is it because the characters are going through something we have? Is it because the story events remind us of our own memories? Is it because we see ourselves in the characters of our story?   Or is it simply because words in front of us speak to who we are?  An Abundance of Katherines  by John Green said it best, “Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.”   Here are my favorite quotes and why they speak to me and my character.   “It’s the imperfections that make things beautiful.” – Jenny Han,  The Summer I Turned Pretty o     Life isn’t perfect, but instead far from it. But we live in a world that constantly pushes us toward finding perfection that simply doesn’t exist. We are imperfect, but life is about finding the beauty those imperfections. To love who we are as individuals and find our place in this bi...