She reached in her purse and she pulled out a gun and said, “Now, just shut up and keep your hands on the wheel. And just drive,” she said. “Just drive,” she said. My friend Circe, one again invoking my name in vain (It’s three times, like with beetlejuice), recently made mention of a question […]
She reached in her purse and she pulled out a gun and said,
“Now, just shut up and keep your hands on the wheel.
And just drive,” she said.
“Just drive,” she said.
My friend Circe, one again invoking my name in vain (It’s three times, like with beetlejuice), recently made mention of a question of focus as concerns blogging. More specifically, the fact that I said to her that I have not been focused enough to put up another entry.
She, of course, belittled me (lovingly). She scoffed at the notion that one would need focus to blog, and suggested that I should sit down and write without thought.
But that, baby, is not my bag.
It’s an interesting question though.
I have a friend, sometimes known as “Papa”, a musician and songwriter (and as good a bass player as I’ve ever know). But one of this guy’s gifts is the ability to do pure stream-of-consciousness writing that is pure brilliance.
Click here for examples. I’m still digging out more, there are dozens of them in archive somewhere.
The thing is, some people do this well. Just write. Just let brain fall to fingertips. Circe does this well. Some somgwriters do it well. Papa does it well.
I have gifts. But this sort of stream of consciousness writing is not naturally my forte. I’ve tried it, and can be funny, but I am aware of myself trying to be funny with it.
To write, I need to start with a thought, and refine it until I know if I have a valid point. Often this refinement is done as a write. I learned many years ago to compose email outside my mailer (Mutt, why would anyone use anything else? And it runs on the mac!). I learned that I was best off composing, thinking, reading, and then sending or discarding. A close friend keeps scolding me for this, for how many emails I have written to her and not sent, but she’ll see one day, when I let one out of the box that should have been drowned at birth, she’ll see why I keep the thought filter on tight.
Circe has a good point. One learns to write by writing. One does not learn by saying “I don’t have anything to write about”.
The question then is, do I want to use this forum to ramble (and god knows, rambling is not a bad thing, I generally encourage my friends to do it, and love it when they do), or do I want to only use it to post semi-clever essays?
Tune in next week…