Capturing Chaos

I’ve never been a celebrations type of person, and as I get older I prefer to spend most of my time to myself, and observe the various kinds of human madness from the sidelines. So, I spent xmas eve, and the day, doing exactly what I normally do—surfing the web (pretty boring on holidays, I can tell you), reading, writing, and watching movies.

Up to a point, observation is a great source for ideas, but writing about my observations doesn’t always work out. Too much of what I see is depressing, and the appropriate comments on human nature just sound like complaining. I try not to complain about what can’t be changed, especially when it comes to how other people live their lives. They do what they’ve been conditioned to do, what their temperaments bias them toward, and what society offers them. They’re insiders and I’m an outsider, and our views of the world are very different.

Which leads to the Lemonade Award, which was kindly given to me by Ambrosiavenus at Chronicles of Caelan , and which I have declined. I understand the purpose of the award, which is to highlight bloggers whose writing is worth your attention. That’s an admirable motive, but it’s something I already do by adding people to my blogroll, and by quoting them now and then, and pointing to their blogs. Continue Reading »

It would be wonderful if every writer could have an automatic recording device plugged into their brain. No more of those great ideas that pop up just as you’re falling asleep, that you try to burn into your brain so you can write them down in the morning. I should have learned my lesson by now, but for some reason, I always think I’m going to hang onto that stroke of genius until morning. Even if the stroke of genius amounts to nothing more than an idea for the next blog post, it’s frustrating to wake up and remember that there was something important to remember. And that I forgot what it was.

How about an automatic filing device? Whatever happened to that little notebook and the pen that I used to keep by the bed, just in case inspiration hit in the middle of a yawn? There weren’t that many bolts from the blue, so the notebook got moved to where note-taking was more likely to happen. And every now and then, I find a little stack of pages ripped out for immediate action and then buried under growing piles of odds and ends that just don’t seem to fit in any sensible category for safe-keeping. Thank goodness, I don’t write on the backs of envelopes.

I used to think that the computer would be the solution. I could enter every note in a handy program that would store my ideas safely, and allow me to find them by keywords. Nobody touting the wonders of computers ever considered that messy and forgetful minds create messy and forgetful computers. So there are bits of paper all over my apartment, and virtual bits of paper all over my computer. Whatever I’m looking for is likely to be in any one of dozens of places. But that’s okay. Out of confusion comes a new game. It’s called Treasure Hunt.

I was in the middle of editing another chunk of the free writing that I wrote about yesterday when I thought it might be interesting to post the original today and the edited version tomorrow. So here, warts and all, is another selection from the top of my head.

“Why do so many people want to be writers when they lack every qualification? They have illusions of adequacy because words are all around us, they’re what we use every day, so it’s assumed that there’s nothing special about them. There’s nothing we need to know about words or language because it’s part of our everyday experience. We think that the grunts of those around us and the grunts we offer then in return are equivalent to what a writer produces and ultimately shows up on the pages of books and magazines.

“It’s a very different thing, though, almost a different world. It is a different world, one you enter either prepared or unprepared. If you’re start out unprepared, and refuse to change your status, you will eventually be cast out, whether rudely or politely, it doesn’t really matter, except in how it affects your understanding. Too polite a rejection teaches nothing. It allows the incompetent to believe that if they just keep trying, the doors will open and they’ll be admitted to the inner sanctum and to what they mistakenly believe is an endless flow of money and adulation.

“If one of these aspiring writers were to take a look at what I’ve produced in the last 15 minutes or so, they would be impressed, possibly awed. How can someone just sit down and produce so many words in such a short time? And where do the ideas come from? They have no conception of what goes into becoming a writer, even one as mediocre in many ways as myself. Years of reading and absorbing the language and its uses. They think that taking courses, being told how to write, how to go about it, are what they need, but it never occurs to them that most writers have never taken a course. The great writers of the past would laugh at such a notion, knowing that their teachers were the writers of previous generations and those of their own generation worthy of their admiration. They might emulate those writers as part of the learning process, but they never took courses or had a teacher in the sense in which we understand teachers.

“So reading is the base, the core of everything that a writer is. Without that base, it’s impossible to become a writer. There is nothing to draw on, nothing learned. The writer who doesn’t read, who hasn’t been reading since early childhood is nothing but an empty shell, and all he can produce is wind the meaningless natter that passes for communication.”

Today has been a struggling-along-the-learning-curve kind of day instead of a writing day. I am discovering — again — that I develop a severe case of writer’s block when faced with large tasks without some kind of a framework. I have an entire website to overhaul from stem to stern on a new site. Creating the content first seemed like a good idea, but not much was getting done. Solution — create the box to put the content in and I’m more likely to get it written before my self-imposed deadline.

So I’ve been playing with the software on three different free web.2 site-creation hosts, trying to find one that I can use to build a new site without tearing my hair out in the process. And the winner is…. Synthasite. It’s all drag and drop, perfect for a CSS illiterate and HTML first grader. It’s even kind of fun, but I’m a writer, not a coder, so I don’t need the thrill of doing it all from scratch. I’ll save that for my cooking. Not tonight, though. I’ve spent so much time tweaking and dragging that suppertime has arrived with nothing done in the kitchen. Frozen pizza for me, with some extra Parmesan and maybe a chopped up slice of smoked pork roll.

I did accomplish one other small thing. I pulled all my articles off Triond. Maybe more about that tomorrow.