Being A Writer

*Quick side note – this post was an assignment for my Journalism Writing and Editing class. I do still feel like it is relevant to this blog though so I am happy to post it here.*

“Being A Writer” is a topic that I find personally challenging. Do I want to be a writer? What do I want to do with my life? It turns into some cosmic question that I’m not sure I know the answer to yet.

There are a couple of things that I know for sure. One is that I love books. My absolute favourite thing to do is hide away somewhere with a good book and stay there until I’ve read it from beginning to end. I have always known that I want to go into a career that would allow me to read. Who wouldn’t want to make a career of the thing that makes them happiest? What I was, and still am, less sure about is exactly how to do that.

It sounds unbelievable but I finally got the idea of exactly what I wanted to be by watching the movie ‘The Proposal’. The movie is about a book publisher and how she manages to fall in love throughout the course of the hour and a half long film. The publisher (Margaret) is a horrible person at the beginning; she is malicious, rude and downright scary, and yet I still wanted to be like her. After much consideration, I realised that the reason I loved the movie so much because of how incredible her job looked. She seemed to be rich and successful and by the end she’s clearly happy and in love too. Sounds pretty great to me.

 

Sword in the Stone

The Sword in the Anvil (in a Stone in a Churchyard)

I can honestly say that I absolutely adored T.H. White’s ‘The Sword in the Stone’. I read it over the weekend as a requirement for my British Modern Fantasy (more on this later) course for English, and by the end I was amazed that I had not read it before!

In hindsight, it is probably better that I only read it now, because it meant that I could understand a large amount of the references – which are clearly aimed at adults for the most part. I think if I had read it at a younger age, I would not have understood how completely hilarious parts of this book are. The personalities of the characters – such as Merlyn and (for me) King Pellinore – made the book constantly entertaining. Some of what happens is so ridiculous that you cannot help but smile.

King Pellinore was by far my favorite character. At first I thought he was incredibly strange (which he is), but he soon started to grow on me. I found myself actually laughing out loud in the scene where Pellinore comes across his Beast while out with the hunting party on Boxing Day. His life goal is to complete his Quest by finding and ‘slaying’ this beast, but he had become distracted over Christmas and had taken a break from the Quest. When they are hunting he finds the Beast very ill and close to death. He comes to the immediate (and correct) conclusion that the Beast was pining away without having him there to chase it. He proceeds to go on a rant about how it was all his fault for not living a regular life.

 

“Before, it was all right. We got up at the same time and quested for regular hours, and went to bed at half-past ten. Now look at it. It’s gone to pieces altogether , and it will be your fault if it dies. You and your hummocky bed.”

 

Pellinore follows this by nursing the Questing Beast back to health by using “kindliness and bread and milk” and was soon back on his happy Quest to kill the thing. He is later saved by the Beast after he has been captured and taken prisoner by a Giant.

Bridget Jones’ Diaries (plural)

The life of Bridget Jones appears to be one big, constantly embarrassing disaster, and yet she still manages to become a relatively successful Journalist, with her own apartment, a number of true friends and a seemingly perfect fiance. I struggle to understand how this is possible!

I saw the first Bridget Jones movie when I was about ten or eleven, and have seen it countless times since, along with the second film, which followed a few years later. I found the movies hilarious and I love Renee Zellweger but, as I realised a few weeks ago, I had never read the books!

I immediately went online and acquired both the first and second novel so that I could read them on my Ebook. Within three days I had finished them both, and had come to the conclusion that I had been seriously missing out.

Bridget dedicates her entire body and soul to complaining about what a disaster her life is at any given moment. She does seem to have some rotten luck, and falls into more embarrassing situations than the average person. However, as a reader I found that I did not mind her constant moaning, because she managed to do it in a way that is completely hilarious.

I spent most of the time while reading wondering to myself how Bridget manages to be chronically late and often completely useless and yet never seems to get into any serious trouble (slightly unrealistic). She also clearly has some kind of eating disorder (or is working towards one) because she weighs herself every day and counts all of her calories. This would be more concerning if she ever actually lost any weight.

I do however, applaud Bridget’s constant working towards ‘Inner Poise’ and her attempts to stay away from possible ’emotional fuckwittage’. She fails quite horribly, but at least she tried. She has a constant plan about what to do in every disastrous situaution, most often supplied by her friends, but things never seem to work out.