Head lines
Aug. 21st, 2006 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kate_schaeferFor years I've excelled at the writing that takes place only in one's head. Letters, journal entries, short stories, poems, essays, novel sections: if I had a tool to dump straight from first draft to paper without going through the fingers, I'd be a giant of literature. Had I that tool, you'd have it, too, and we'd all be fabulous writers.
We'd still need the editor, the voice that says that amazing essay was in fact fatuous now that it's all done, and it can be thrown out without anyone missing it at all. Some of us may not need the editor quite as much as we get it now.
Some of those unwritten essays in the past month have included:
- a description of the milk carton derby at Green Lake (annual race, anyone can enter, flotation must be provided by milk cartons, although it looked like a liberal interpretation allowed plastic milk bottles as well; major element of the race is not to sink the boat before the race ends)
- a meditation on the multiplicity of details going into a family wedding, dull in themselves to anyone not involved in that particular wedding, interesting in their sameness to all weddings (I used to think that the only things I could write about that would be interesting to anyone were things unique to me; as I grow older and older and older, I begin to think that the only things I write about that are interesting to others are things similar to those they have experienced)
- a description of a hike at Sunrise on Mount Rainier with Bridget Bradshaw, Carrie Root, Andy Hooper, and Glenn; on our way down the mountain after hiking, we passed a rusty, beat-up, cool old car (to my eye), instantly recognizable to Andy as a 1932 Crown Vicky, chopped and modified into a hot rod probably right after the Second World War
- a paragraph about the flock of small birds nearly always to be found in my backyard, moving as if a single animal from chainlink fence to lilac bush to wooden fence
and none of these is likely to be written at length. We go on.
We'd still need the editor, the voice that says that amazing essay was in fact fatuous now that it's all done, and it can be thrown out without anyone missing it at all. Some of us may not need the editor quite as much as we get it now.
Some of those unwritten essays in the past month have included:
- a description of the milk carton derby at Green Lake (annual race, anyone can enter, flotation must be provided by milk cartons, although it looked like a liberal interpretation allowed plastic milk bottles as well; major element of the race is not to sink the boat before the race ends)
- a meditation on the multiplicity of details going into a family wedding, dull in themselves to anyone not involved in that particular wedding, interesting in their sameness to all weddings (I used to think that the only things I could write about that would be interesting to anyone were things unique to me; as I grow older and older and older, I begin to think that the only things I write about that are interesting to others are things similar to those they have experienced)
- a description of a hike at Sunrise on Mount Rainier with Bridget Bradshaw, Carrie Root, Andy Hooper, and Glenn; on our way down the mountain after hiking, we passed a rusty, beat-up, cool old car (to my eye), instantly recognizable to Andy as a 1932 Crown Vicky, chopped and modified into a hot rod probably right after the Second World War
- a paragraph about the flock of small birds nearly always to be found in my backyard, moving as if a single animal from chainlink fence to lilac bush to wooden fence
and none of these is likely to be written at length. We go on.
