By: Blonde One
We all have lots of traditions, especially at this time of year. They make us feel comfy and secure and are to be encouraged.
When Little Miss Blonde was an even littler Miss Blonde it was a tradition that I would make up fairy stories for her. These stories were never planned, never written down and never had an unhappy ending. It has been a very long time since I have made up a story for her and for some reason she has been pestering me this year to make up a Christmas story. Two of the Blonde One rules of story telling have been broken with this one: the story has been planned (a little bit), written down (well, typed anyway) but does still contain a happy ending! The result will be posted tomorrow as part of my Christmas gifts to my very special daughter!
Merry Christmas to Little Miss Blonde and all of the readers of the Blonde One Christmas story. X
Dear Blondes
Please keep us amused into 2014 with your Blogs.
Wishing you and yours best wishes for the festive season.. Enjoy and love those yoiu are with.
Carlos
Sending our Blonde Christmas wishes to you too!
I detect a faintly apologetic tone about rules being broken, notably to do with planning and writing things down. May I, in the kindest possible way, offer an alternative attitude.
Browning (the poet not the gun) has a lot to answer for. He has caused many people to set great store by “the first fine careless rapture” principle – as if what bursts forth first from from the creative process is necessarily the purest, freshest, most original, and – in short – the best. As if revision somehow tainted this effusion. Was somehow undesirably “professional”.
In fact the first burst is frequently a cliché and overloaded with unnecessary words. There is no shame in recognising this. Very few writers who write/wrote for a living (I’ll make an exception with Evelyn Waugh) get it right first time. What the first burst attitude does is make things easier for the writer.
Yet all of us who write for others to read (and what other reason is there?) should bear in mind the awfulness of this saying:
Easy writing = hard reading.
For what it’s worth (although you could find many better examples than mine) this cry from the heart (cliché I fear) was drafted in Notepad alongside your post and revised a hundred times. It isn’t perfect, an absurd claim. But it’s better than what I started with.
You are writing for Little Miss Blonde. Is there a more important reader in the world?
Which isn’t to say your writing’s schlock. In fact it has drawn in the second most important reader in the world.
Would that I could have made this more Christmassy. I’ll now go out and gather winter fu-ooo-el.