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How you give what you consume
Back in the days of fidget spinners and before the trending Stanley tumbler, I read books upon books, but hated writing. Yep, as a kid who didn’t realize the potential I had by reading, I made grudges against English teachers who would hand over to me my 85% grades, and sometimes even 70%’s.
The only reason why I somewhat did fine in English at the time, was to keep my dad from scolding me, and so that I didn’t need to repeat the whole grade.
Lessons learned
Even though I read a somewhat varied assortment of books, there was a genre I couldn’t resist: Sci-Fi and Adventure storytelling.
Even at 9 years old, before I knew how to hold grudges, I had lots of fun writing adventure novels called “The Jungle of ???”, an immature take on Indiana Jones I suppose. Then when I was older, somehow I won 2nd place in a writing contest on Sci-Fi.
Yet, as I explain in this story, I hated grammar, so my storytelling skills never went anywhere.
What I did though, was keep reading. Even though I had preconceived notions about writing and the kind of people that make writers, same as notions I made about coders, gamers, and the etc. in which I found myself becoming at some point in my life: it was the experience that changed my perspective.
After a few years of studying for school at home, I wrote stories on my own without anyone to judge. Not only that, but I found that the lingo I read in adventure novels started to come into my own vocabulary as I wrote.
Writing became the best avenue for expressing my personality and thoughts.
Like a sponge…
You take everything from your environment, especially the books you read and what you watch.
Why do people cuss? Or make jokes that seemed to come from the 80’s? Because they either watched someone or were around someone who talked that way.
The more we read, or heck — consume any media, the more we take from their vocabulary and way of speaking like a baby does when saying its parents’ names.
Recently, I’ve started gravitating toward more logical books like The Extended Mind and research articles from .gov sites. Not only have I been learning from them, but I see the sentence structure and vocabulary rubbing off of them into this very story!