Dear Reader,
Some of us have the luxury of having style manuals and an assortment of other useful books on hand. Others of our crew have impressive internet search skills that brings the information to their fingertips. However you have your resources accessible, keep them near by. We learn a lot from the writing process by doing. At the same time, nothing is quite as handy as a good thesaurus or as vital as a good dictionary. (You're not required to have the murder weapon sized dictionary that I own, but the Webster's Unabridged Dictionary is a great dual purpose tool. It also works well to help hold up a coffee table with a third of the leg missing. I suppose you could say it's multifunctional.)
I miss the days of encyclopedias. I have a fondness for working from paper. That said, good digital archives of information are vital for making sure that you have all your proverbial ducks in a row when you're writing scenes instead of a horde of squirrels at a rave. Editing the squirrel rave is ugly, trust me. Glow stick nunchucks plus angry squirrels does not make for an easy time correcting the scene's flow or fixing details. If you're lucky, the music is the good version of dubstep and not the dubstep version of the Thomas the Tank Engine theme. (It's on Youtube, my kids have watched it a thousand times. Please kill me.)
They say keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I say keep your sources closer than your enemies and work in secret. This way they never knew what hit them when your project drops and you can just count the bodies as they fall. (Or something.) Write your first draft with abandon and joy. Work out that second, third, and umpteenth draft with your resources at your side. It'll tighten up your plot in the places where it's gotten out of whack. It'll help you keep that dramatic tension just right. And it'll prevent your work from being invaded by angry rave squirrels with nunchucks of disinformation.
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