whew
Okay, draft revised. It went from two pages to one and a half just from cleaning up the prose. I'm a pretty good writer, but my early drafts (I wish I could say "first draft," but no) inevitably suck ice cubes through a garden hose. Why use one word when seven will do the trick? Why use active verbs when I can use inappropriate nominalizations? Why say something once, clearly, when I can say it twice with obfuscation?
I would claim that the problem stems from being in school way too long, but in fact school is where I learned to get rid of this crap. No, this is just my brain. Some people say "um" when they're thinking or stalling for time; I produce entire complex-compound-sentence written equivalents to "um." Also, my ability to overuse semicolons (not to mention adverbial prepositional phrases) is truly stupendous.
I am occasionally amazed that I get away with teaching writing, but that amazement is a function of still believing, in some dark inside place less rational than my mind, that real writers get it right the first time. I know how untrue that is; look, I live upstairs from a writer who's in approximately the 937th round of revisions of a book whose evolution has taken years, and which was a damn fine book even before the last several rounds of revising. I have daily proof that writing means revision. But accepting that truth in a way that can't be overridden at any given moment by my desperate anxiety and laziness... Well. Let's put a little positive spin on it and call it a life goal, shall we?
Blah blah blah self-absorption-cakes. I'm going to quit spamming LJ now. The time has come for soaring music, mint ice cream, and the cats' dinner. Not necessarily in that order.
I would claim that the problem stems from being in school way too long, but in fact school is where I learned to get rid of this crap. No, this is just my brain. Some people say "um" when they're thinking or stalling for time; I produce entire complex-compound-sentence written equivalents to "um." Also, my ability to overuse semicolons (not to mention adverbial prepositional phrases) is truly stupendous.
I am occasionally amazed that I get away with teaching writing, but that amazement is a function of still believing, in some dark inside place less rational than my mind, that real writers get it right the first time. I know how untrue that is; look, I live upstairs from a writer who's in approximately the 937th round of revisions of a book whose evolution has taken years, and which was a damn fine book even before the last several rounds of revising. I have daily proof that writing means revision. But accepting that truth in a way that can't be overridden at any given moment by my desperate anxiety and laziness... Well. Let's put a little positive spin on it and call it a life goal, shall we?
Blah blah blah self-absorption-cakes. I'm going to quit spamming LJ now. The time has come for soaring music, mint ice cream, and the cats' dinner. Not necessarily in that order.