.htaccess – still

I have completed my install, and I have been playing with the software, learning my way around. I have been trying to get permalinks to work for days now. Here’s the deal. At first, I had no .ftaccess. I looked for hidden files by turning on “show hidden files” in FileZilla. Nothing. Someone on the boards here told me to upload a blank file and how to do that, so I did. I used chmod to set it to 666. It’s all good. Now when I try to set permalinks, the text at the top says that I should “update my .ftaccess file” – text at the bottom of the page says that my .ftaccess is not writable, but if it was, it would write in the following text. I have tried manually dumping the text into my .htaccess file, which resulted in the whole site being 403 Forbidden. That’s no good, so the text is back out, and I am where I started, with an empty .ftacess file that is unwritable apparently. Any ideas on what I may have done wrong?