Writing Tips from George Orwell

Buyakasha. My main man George Orwell provides practical guidelines for better writing: http://www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/PageID/300 Reminds me of something one of my high school writing teachers told us (I'm paraphrasing): "If you write a phrase you're heard before, find a new way to write it." Of course, all these rules can be broken, usually making the writing funnier, as long as you're actively breaking them and not just lazy.

I was pretty much obsessed with the idea of being a mysterious child with magical powers when I was a kid. One of the dorkier things I've ever done was at summer camp when the counselors made everyone write down a wish at the beginning of the summer on a little piece of paper and crumple it up, not telling us that they were going to uncrumple them at the end of the summer and read them out loud while we sat around a circle in a barn. I think I was twelve. I vividly recall wanting to die when they started pulling these familiar crumpled up pieces of paper out of a bag and reading each wish aloud, all of which were along the lines of hoping to make new friends, have fun and learn how to swim, and remembering that my wish had been that by the end of the summer I would develop telekinesis. I spent the next five minutes in this barn trying to decide whether it would be more or less embarrassing if I just bumrushed the counselors, grabbed the bag of wishes and bolted from the room with it. My main concern was that they would catch me before I reached the main road and that I'd have no choice but to eat the entire bag of wishes in front of everybody.