Friday Five – Why Writing is like playing with LEGO
This week, I welcome Debra Tidball to Friday Five to share some writing tips.
5 ways that writing is like playing with LEGO
(or everything I know about writing I learned from LEGO)
I like to think of writing as play – playing with words and ideas to create something that excites readers to think differently. As writers, we often have the idea that writing is work, and we feel angst when it isn’t going how we would like. If we think of writing as play it removes it from the realm of chore into pleasure. It’s an analogy I use when talking with kids in schools – and in these days of writing on computers, it’s an easy concept for kids to visualise words, sentences and paragraphs as blocks to delete, cut and paste etc, – just like re-arranging LEGO bricks. Both forms of play are imaginative, whether you build buildings or stories – you have an idea in your head that you want to represent in a concrete form, and you manipulate elements (bricks or words) to do it. It’s fun – bringing form to the formless – in one case from a puddle of blocks on the floor, and in the other from fragments of ideas floating around inside your head. So what are 5 ways writing is like playing with LEGO? [Read more…]
