TheEconomicon

In honor of the new year, here is my simple tutorial for setting up and maintaining a language journal. I’ve made 3 so far using this method for spanish, french, and italian because it’s so simple. Disfruta y espero que logres sus metas de lengua este año! <3

What You’ll Need:

composition book

highlighters

flashcard(s)

black ink pen

- a few of my favorite things, 2017 -

Every writer gets asked where we get out ideas from time to time. As far as burdens of our field go, that I work in a field that people ask about sometimes doesn’t register as a complaint. On planes, at parties, in the waiting rooms of hospitals, I am an Interesting Person To Sit Next To, which often countermands the first impression I radiate, which is Ew Weirdo.

The answers, unless the writer in question is feeling pissy, tend towards the same-ish neighborhood of responses: “everywhere” or “my life” or “the news” or “dreams” – all leading to the generally same dénouement of “Writing is a discipline that requires a lot of work, and working a little bit every day gets you a little better every day” and so on. I think I read Stephen King sometimes claims to get his ideas from a little store in New England somewhere, for a buck a piece. But really it’s sitting down and doing it a lot until you fool someone into paying you.

OR SO WRITERS WOULD HAVE YOU THINK.

I am violating the rules of the Secret Writers Union doing this (sorry gang) but I don’t care, it was a hard year and I want to talk about good things in the inexorable march towards the new one. So here you go, cats and kittens:

The real secret to writing are Palomino Blackwing pencils.  

Some will say you gotta go 602, others maybe the basic black; I myself even dabble with the pearl or even the bright blue HBs (sorta like ordering off-menu, that one you gotta find for yourselves), because why go through life with one hand tied behind your back. That’s how any of us do it. Any writer. All writers. Everywhere. We write with those pencils. That’s where the ideas come from. None of the writing comes from us, it’s the goddamn pencils, we’re like muscle-vessels and they Krang the shit out of us through the hands. We hold on and they swoop themselves across the page and when you look down, you got words and subjects and objects and predicates and shit, boom boom boom.

Even Sondheezy agrees, the only pencil worth using are Blackwings. When they went out of business the first time, he bought all the dead stock.