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What I'm doing here
Friday, 6 May 2016 12:14 am"That's An Illegal Use Of A Silent Consonant."*
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I love writing. Writing does a lot of things for me: it helps me keep track of things; it helps me thing logically about things; it entertains me; it helps me communicate clearly; it distracts and distances me when I'm upset; it teaches me about myself. Those are some of the reasons I resolved to write here more often.
My goal was to post every day—which never meant writing every day. (That's in the past tense because I've already missed several days.) I don't have the time or focus to write a whole post every day, at least not about the things I'm interested in writing about. So I gave myself permission to post some of my odd photos and some poetry by and stories about the Algonquin Round Table. I also decided to move some things I posted in other places over here. I wanted to consolidate. And I wanted to make the most of my words.
That's something a writer learns fast: don't waste words. Writing is hard, and once you've managed to do it right, to say something that seems worth sharing with the world, you want to make the most of it.
It becomes automatic. You're writing a response to something on Facebook and it gets a little long, you copy and paste it into a word processing document because why waste those words in on a small audience of mostly-strangers and people who will never read you again when you can post it where your target audience is?
I recently listened to The Big Sleep. I'd read it before, and since then I've seen the movie numerous times. This time was different. What really stood out were how few changes there are in the dialogue of the movie.
I mean, the plot's mangled. Done to satisfy the Code, the dirty plot was cleaned up, but it somehow became a convoluted mess. But the dialogue? William Faulkner (who I believe wrote the original screenplay) was a very smart writer. They had a whole book full of Raymond Chandler's sparkling dialogue; what kind of fool would throw that out, just to write words that said the same thing? I can just hear it, "I keep the dialogue, rearrange it where I have to, now all I have to do is re-plot the damn thing."
If the soul of writing is made up of all the intangibles it gives me, this is the pragmatic body of it: words are a commodity and writers know how to make the most of them.
*Crow T. Robot
-:- -:- -:- -:-
I love writing. Writing does a lot of things for me: it helps me keep track of things; it helps me thing logically about things; it entertains me; it helps me communicate clearly; it distracts and distances me when I'm upset; it teaches me about myself. Those are some of the reasons I resolved to write here more often.
My goal was to post every day—which never meant writing every day. (That's in the past tense because I've already missed several days.) I don't have the time or focus to write a whole post every day, at least not about the things I'm interested in writing about. So I gave myself permission to post some of my odd photos and some poetry by and stories about the Algonquin Round Table. I also decided to move some things I posted in other places over here. I wanted to consolidate. And I wanted to make the most of my words.
That's something a writer learns fast: don't waste words. Writing is hard, and once you've managed to do it right, to say something that seems worth sharing with the world, you want to make the most of it.
It becomes automatic. You're writing a response to something on Facebook and it gets a little long, you copy and paste it into a word processing document because why waste those words in on a small audience of mostly-strangers and people who will never read you again when you can post it where your target audience is?
I recently listened to The Big Sleep. I'd read it before, and since then I've seen the movie numerous times. This time was different. What really stood out were how few changes there are in the dialogue of the movie.
I mean, the plot's mangled. Done to satisfy the Code, the dirty plot was cleaned up, but it somehow became a convoluted mess. But the dialogue? William Faulkner (who I believe wrote the original screenplay) was a very smart writer. They had a whole book full of Raymond Chandler's sparkling dialogue; what kind of fool would throw that out, just to write words that said the same thing? I can just hear it, "I keep the dialogue, rearrange it where I have to, now all I have to do is re-plot the damn thing."
If the soul of writing is made up of all the intangibles it gives me, this is the pragmatic body of it: words are a commodity and writers know how to make the most of them.
*Crow T. Robot
