Writin' 'Bout Writin'

One of my favorite things to do is to take a set of facts and use them to imagine how the world might work. In writing about some of these ideas, my aim is not to be correct — how can I be, when the answer isn’t known? — but to be thought-provoking, to ask questions, to make people wonder. - Olivia Judson

That is actually a very recent quote from an opinion piece in the NYTimes by Olivia Judson. I like the way she writes, although recently I have been reading books and articles with styles I do not care for. It seems that like John Cage music there are some disconnected writing modes that really ring some reader's cerebral chimes. I am discovering that reading the discordant makes it oh so much easier to analyze the style if not the attraction. Right now I am plowing through Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon with it's over 1100 pages. Back when I was working in the cyber-reality, I enjoyed the darkness of his virtual world in Snow Crash, but his herky-jerky story line in this work is distracting. Yet, I persevere because I am trying to master the craft of reading a work I truly admire without getting lost in the author's world.

I want to see beneath the fiction and discover the structure that allows a reader to fall so deeply into the created world. I have read the Mars Trilogy at least three times trying to follow the seamless character transitions. I strive to some day be able to read Blake and understand how his hallucinations can become mine. Until then I will scribble away at my several nascent books and articles, hoping they will someday emerge into the light of public scrutiny and paint worlds yet unseen for my readers.

A Mix and Match Rant

Two items cross my path in the last forty-eight. Hmm, perhaps it was their paths that crossed. Whatever, I have been putting in a clump of hours on the Matusow screenplay and in that light I was interested in an article link sent to me by three separate friends. The title is: No I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script. If you are considering a screenplay, novel, short story or even a blog; I cordially invite you to read it. To my friends, buddies, pals and family members who will be getting our screenplay in a few weeks, thanks in advance and if you read this psot, maybe please thank-you also read the article.

Item two is a quotation from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig:

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.

Now I'm no Luddite, my life has been dramatically changed by the personal computer and the internet. But all great advances have a dark underbelly. OK, most of them do; I haven't done an exhaustive list. And it is not just reasonable outcomes that can fail to be accretive to the good of humanity. There are simply less than satisfactory non-accomplishments that abound because of our really big technocracy. The primary culprit in today's rant is writing. Sure start a blog, write every day or twice a year; good for you, get it out, say it, write. But that does not make you a writer.

As the article says: "It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't. By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers."

Mind you I say this as an apprentice writer. No not a writer yet, despite having a book and a couple of hundred articles on poker out there plus several fiction pieces floating about the interwebs. But I am an aspiring, apprentice writer. Nasty (unpublished) comments I get on this blog regularly remind me of my shortcomings, real or imagined by my faithful if cranky readers.

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