sciens

I was reminded the other day why I once wanted to become a writer.

I had been writing nothing in particular (Wendesday's post, in fact) and when I was finished, I had about eight or nine tabs across the top of my computer to various websites where I had been fact-checking, quoting, appeasing my curiosity, and other minor forms of research I had been conducting while writing.  

The reason why I once wanted to write was because I was under the impression that writers knew at least something about everything.

And if there's something a writer did not know about, they would learn about it as they wrote about it.  Thereby becoming even more knowledgeable.  It's pretty great, really.

See, in order to know something about almost everything, you have to be perpetually learning something about almost anything.  And what better way to learn things than by writing about them?  The act of writing about something makes you think about it in new ways that you wouldn't necessarily consider otherwise.  And then you have questions that you normally wouldn't consider.  Like "Does it make sense for Robin Hood to be eating bacon in thirteenth century England?  Did they have pigs back then?  Would that have been practical for someone of the outlaw/yeoman class?"  So then you look it up.

It's like Sesame Street always said: "Asking questions is a great way to find things out."

Things have since changed, but that doesn't mean that you have to be a writer by profession in order to write.  This blog is one such example.  :)  Hooray!