A Little Bit Written

To begin, I don’t think it requires much more than a vague familiarity with English and her contributing languages to realize that yes, this blog title is in Latin. To be perfectly honest, the tagline “Everything Written” is a bit deceiving; Omnia Scripta is most accurately translated as “every thing having been written.” Latin lacks the sort of past-present tense that creates the present perfect sense of “written,” so I’ll make do with what I have.

And I feel with that sort of introduction, a bit of “About Me” is required.

In college, I have been a Greek & Latin and Political Science double major. As this blog continues, that fact will explain the great majority of my writing material. I am an enthusiastic believer in the idea of inter-disciplinary knowledge, and I’ve not only managed to combine my seemingly disparate majors, but I’ve also used them to inspire and influence my non-academic writing. Beyond my scholastic endeavors, though, I believe that I’ve been given three primary roles in life (distinct from all my social-personal goals of marriage, someday becoming a mother, and serving whatever communities I’m a part of) and I think these will also provide extra insight into my mind and personality.

First of all, I am a teacher. I have tutored, taught, and edited since my early teens, whether to my three siblings or to students outside of the family circle, and fervently believe in both the power of and the need for education. I believe that the main outcome of education is to inspire and satisfy curiosity in a way that promotes inner reflection and change. (It should also be noted that I have recently been reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stewart Mill, who both put great stock in the power of the educated mind. But I digress, and I have been a great fan of learning and teaching long before I had the opportunity to engage those particular thinkers.).

I am and forever shall be a student. Some people, I know, see learning and knowledge as a means to an end. For me, as my assignment to Ravenclaw on Pottermore confirmed, knowledge very often is that end. I appreciate Gryffindor’s use of knowledge to further an agenda, and Hufflepuff’s aim to apply knowledge to helping people, but when I am being truly honest with myself, I know that my grab-bag of knowledge isn’t very immediately useful — that is, until I can identify Mongolian throat singing on a Netflix show.

But, to fit the pieces of this puzzle together and explain the purposes of this blog, I must declare that I am a writer. Everything I learn, see, encounter, and think ultimately ends up in one of my stories. Both of my majors, though not chosen with my writing in mind, have become some of my most profitable story-mines. I predominately write fantasy, but if I was forced to choose an overarching genre to describe my stories, I’d have to call it “speculative fiction.”

But then, isn’t all fiction arguably speculative?

And this brings me to the reason for this blog. I am here to write about writing. There are many wonderful blogs and podcasts about writing (If you haven’t checked out Writing Excuses, you really should. The podcasts are hilarious, informative, and never more than 20 minutes, so they’re really worth your time!) but I wanted to take my experiences and knowledge and turn them into a blog exploring what I — we! — can learn about writing from unconventional sources. I will draw from ancient epics, theories and models from the social sciences, the Classics, movies and TV shows, and anything else that catches my attention. When we write, we write about the world, and I believe the world has quite a bit to teach us about our endeavors. Sometimes I will tell you what I think we can learn from an established paradigm. Sometimes I’ll say what I think went wrong in some story-telling attempt. Sometimes I’ll praise an author for something he or she did wonderfully, breathtakingly right. And, other times, I will posts bits of my own writing exercises drawn from prompts I’ve found online or been challenged to by other writing websites. I believe that learning is an interactive experience, and the only way to get better at a thing is to practice it.

So welcome to Omnia Scripta! There is something to learn in almost everything, and I’m determined and excited to follow this path and find it.