Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Writing this

Sometimes, here, I will write a sentence, look it over, and decide it is not fit for publication. Maybe, I muse, it is unnecessary to make fun of people who are under the impression that Thursday is two days after Wednesday. Isn't the journey of life steep enough as it is for these people? So unless my sentence is funny enough to make up for the cruelty of it all, out it goes. But it is just a small taste of things I may delete in the course of writing one of these essays. I might get rid of words, punctuation, clauses, and parenthetical remarks (though this one's a keeper!). Whole paragraphs, labored over for an hour, deep in the library stacks, may be shown the door. Bits may be deleted, re-added, and then deleted again. This is all part of the writing process. Like, there, did you see that? I got rid of three "uh's", two "very's", and five "like's". I left one "like" though, at the start of a sentence, to give you a taste of what you're missing. Good, huh? Oh yeah, it's excellent. But only in moderation.

This is the life of a writer. It is how a writer writes, and we quite like it this way. Where else can one perfect language at one's leisure? Certainly not in talking. Talking leaves a trail of chaos, saved only by our chronic forgetfulness and inability to listen properly. No, writing is the place. Everything is erasable, cookable, tasteable, and everlastingly adjustable. All is under the composer's dominion, limited only by the boundaries of the writer's talents, boundaries which barely exist when one is gripped in the fever of creation.

When the fever breaks, however, sometimes things are not so pretty. Sometimes the writer is compelled to delete a whole essay, forced by the illuminations of reconsideration to write it off as nonredeemable. It is a bitter and hard and cold work then. All dreams lie shattered at one's feet, and a blogger is left late in the night with no post for tomorrow morning. What can he do?

He can write this.


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If you were wondering, yes, you should comment. Not only does it remind me that I must write in intelligible English because someone is actually reading what I write, but it is also a pleasure for me since I am interested in anything you have to say.

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