Writing Works With The GIGO Rule - Garbage In, Garbage Out

Hello everyone!

I hope that you're doing amazing wherever you are in the world.

I welcome you to the Soul Vitamins community and I'm really grateful that you're listening and I hope that you're enjoying or at least getting some value out of the things that we're talking about.

And I don't know if you are a writer,

All INFJs or a lot of people nowadays seem to be into writing because it's just such an easy,

Perfect way of expressing ourselves,

Right?

And I think I've said this already,

I'm part of a writing group and as I did not expect this,

But I'm learning so much from the ladies in the group.

A couple of them are editors,

So they edit other people's books and so of course they have a lot of knowledge about editing and that's where I am completely a newbie.

I don't have that much experience with it,

Also I'm not good at it because it requires a lot of attention to detail and I must say that attention to detail is not one of my strong traits.

I don't know if it is a strong trait of yours,

But I have to say it is not mine.

I run away from everything that requires a lot of attention to detail or I can do it for little snippets of time,

But then after a little bit of time I'm so exhausted I can't do it anymore.

So it's really nice because they are really good at it and they can tell me this does not work,

This does work.

And one of the things we were talking about recently was how,

Just like their fashion trends and trends and the way people live their lives in a lot of different fashions,

There might be a fashion in the way you want to live either in the suburbs or you want to live downtown in a city or there might be a fashion in the way there's lots of people going into engineering at some point and then they start going into artificial intelligence.

There's all these trends or fashions you want to call it in everything,

Right?

And again,

Same thing with writing,

There are fashions and trends in writing as well.

And I don't know about you,

But I spent a lot of my youth reading British novels.

My mom has a lot of loved British authors and I learned to read and I learned my love for reading through my mother.

She taught us.

She would give us a book and be like,

This is a really good book,

You should read it.

And I would read it.

She was the one who introduced Gone with the Wind to me and I read it in one night.

I sat all night long,

I did not sleep,

It was a summer occasion.

I just read the full thing,

It was so good.

I was like,

Oh my God,

I want more of this.

And then realized that she had a sequel,

But it was not as interesting.

And then she had other authors,

Of course,

That she recommended to us.

Of course,

Like the easy ones,

Like Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes.

And then we read all the typical ones of Nancy Boys,

The Drew Brothers or something like that.

Nancy Drew,

Nancy Boys,

Nancy Drew and then the Grady Boys.

I don't remember now.

Anyway,

We read a lot of those kind of books.

And then my mom started introducing us to a little bit more serious fiction.

Gone with the Wind was not introduced to me when I was a child.

Of course,

It was when I was a teenager.

And she also told us about Dick Francis,

Which is another author that she loves and I and my sister love as well.

He is brilliant.

He's dead now.

But all of his books,

We have all of them at home.

They're old,

They're tattered,

But he's so good.

I mean,

He's just one of my favorite authors.

As you can tell from all the different books that I've been mentioning,

They're all extremely old.

And this is just the drop in the bucket.

I have so many other authors that I read throughout my years.

And a lot of them,

Some of them were new authors for sure,

Of course,

Like Harry Potter and things like that.

Lauren Sanders,

Daniel Steele,

Jeffrey Deaver,

John Grisham.

I read all the new ones,

Of course,

The new hot authors.

But whenever I had to fall back upon my favorite authors,

It would always be the older ones.

I'd be reading extremely old authors like Angela Carter and Daphne du Maurier.

And Dick Francis is a very old author as well.

And then just really old,

Old authors.

And then a lot of old science fiction authors as well,

Like Ursula Le Guin and Philip K.

Dick.

Sam,

I don't remember his name now.

A bunch of older,

Older authors,

Obviously.

And as you can imagine,

A lot of my writing,

What you read is what you usually end up writing as well.

It's like what comes in goes out,

Garbage in,

Garbage out.

But whatever writing comes in,

Comes out as well.

And I started noticing that a lot of my writing is very old and British,

Very British sounding.

And there are these websites where you can put in your writing.

It says what authors do I sound like.

And I write like this author.

And I'll put a link,

If I remember,

In the description.

And you can put in your writing and it tells you which author you sound like.

And every single time I put my writing in,

It sounds like Margaret Atwood or Agatha Christie or Virginia Woolf.

Old,

Old female British-ish authors.

Just old authors.

And I love them,

Of course.

They're brilliant.

Their writing is just evocative.

It's deep.

It has so much depth to it.

It's three dimensional.

It's beautiful.

But then of course,

What happens is that it dates me.

And that's what a lot of,

Like whenever they read my books,

I read my writing,

They're always like,

Yeah,

You write well-ish.

But it's very much like a parent that you are writing from.

You are writing as if you're a 60,

70 year old woman.

A 60,

70 year old British woman even.

And at first I wanted to laugh at that because I have only mostly been reading 60 year old or older British authors,

Both male and females.

But I did not realize how much they affected my writing.

And I sound like them now when I'm writing.

And in one way it's good because it's a little bit,

You know,

Their writing is beautiful.

But in another way,

Of course,

It's really terrible because most of the people who are reading books right now are not looking to read old British authors.

They're looking to read young authors who have a new style,

A fresh way of writing things.

And I was doing all these things that even in grammatical ways that is very old fashioned.

And people don't do that anymore.

Or at least they haven't been doing it for the last 10 years.

And you know,

The editor friends of mine,

They read my book and they're like,

Yeah.

You do a lot of things that of course what you've been reading that British authors do.

For example,

Older authors would always be able to write things like,

She said angrily.

Or,

You know,

He asked with disdain or things like that.

They would always say things like that.

It's an adverb that is added to whatever the person is saying.

You know,

Like,

I hate you.

She said angrily or something like that.

Right.

Well,

They don't say this.

She said angrily anymore.

They say my friends,

Editor friends tell me.

They're like,

You know,

You don't use the angrily anymore.

You have to show rather than tell.

You show the person that they're angry.

You show the author,

The writer,

Sorry,

The reader that they're angry.

So like maybe they stomp away from the room and say,

I hate you.

And then that's how the reader knows that they were angry.

Right.

So you show,

Don't tell.

And I end up doing a lot of telling,

Not showing.

Of course,

This is something that's very fixable and over time I'm sure I'm going to learn.

But I,

You know,

I really do.

I'm always surprised at how powerful all of this is where it really is.

Whatever you take in is what comes out of you.

You know,

If you take in a lot of violent,

Dramatic TV shows,

Then you're going to be there's going to be a lot of violent,

Dramatic thoughts are going to come up in your head.

And if you're going to be taking in a lot of soft,

Beautiful music,

Classical,

And that's how a lot of your day is going to pan out as well.

You know,

And,

You know,

I'm always surprised that people who are constantly watching like TV,

Crime TV shows where people are dying and angry with each other or soap operas where people are always mean to each other and hate each other.

And then they don't have good relationships or they're like always having issues in relationships or they're always talking mean about other people or they're always cruel to other people or other people are always cruel to them.

And then I wonder,

You know,

They're like,

But how,

Why does this happen to me?

And I'm like,

I mean,

Look at your life,

Look at what you're bringing into your life,

Look at what you're looking at,

What are you thinking about all day long.

How can you be looking at wild TV,

Create crime shows all day long or listen to the news all day long and have positive thoughts at the same time?

You're not,

You know,

God,

You know,

It's very,

It's very impossible for a normal human being to do that.

So,

You know,

Of course you have to be extremely careful of what you put in.

And I didn't realize I'm usually very careful with,

You know,

I don't watch a lot of TV.

I try to be cognizant of what I read and I don't watch the news or read the news as much as possible unless,

You know,

Something crazy is going on in the world.

But I didn't realize,

You know,

What the kind of books I was reading as well were transmitting all these interesting information into my writing.

You know,

It was like dictating my writing as well.

Now that I'm going to be more careful about it,

Maybe it'll change as well and start becoming more modern.

I'll have to see how long that takes because I have been reading old British authors for 30 odd years now.

So that's a long time to negate.

In any case,

I want to share this with you because I thought it was so funny and so interesting.

And I'd love to hear what kind of authors you usually prefer and what kind of books you're usually reading,

Because that'd be really interesting to me.

Again,

Thank you so much for listening and I shall see you the next time around.

Bye.