A Dash of Words with Loleta Abi Romance Author

The Writer’s Wheel 8/20/19: The Futility in Thinking You’ll Ever “Know” it All

Traci Kenworth

If You Do “Know” it All, what a waste.

That is, you’ll go through life bored. If you’ve nothing to learn: where’s the spontaneity, the fun of reading a book, and pushing through the learning curve to master something? If you “know” it all, you’d be ignoring most conversations. Life would be dull and fruitless. Trust me, eat the fruit! Try something, anything, to break away from the wall you’ve built around you. Open up to others and learn from them.

Don’t Ever Stop Learning.

Studies show that the brain needs to stay active to live. If you’re not learning anything, cells are dying off. Give yourself a nudge. It’s fun once you’ve gotten started. Did you read all of Shakespeare’s plays? Little Women? Gone with the Wind? Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn? The Three Investigators? The Black Stallion? What about Flicka? Little House on the Prairie? His Dark Materials? The Dark Rising? Merlin’s story in The Crystal Cave series? The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman? Anything from Toni Morrison? The Joy Luck Club? Tiffany Sly Lives Here? Children of Blood and Bone? The list could go on and on. New works are being done every day. Surely, there’s something to be learned from this. No two stories are ever alike. Unless plagiarized.

As Above, You Couldn’t Have Read Everything.

There are simply too many books in the world. Millions get published each year. If you read a book every day of your life, you’d still never finish. See? There are still new ideas to explore, new characters to enjoy, and new talents to read about. Every writer gets the seed of an idea and grows it in a different way. Thus, Twilight, Salem’s Lot, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Each writer finds a twist, something to play off of, that brings a joy, a newness to the work. I couldn’t write vampires like Stephen King because they wouldn’t have his energy, his freshness, his brilliance in the prose. Then again, he couldn’t write vampires like me either. We’re all different, even with the same idea. If you put your mind to it, you could tell your own stories. Familiar yet odd or twisted. A love poem? A hate narrative? A survival novel? A damnation tale? They all work together to bring new visions to the world. Art is precious. To be encouraged. It brings hope and wisdom and perhaps dreams that come true.