on writing

An essayist, a novelist, a memoirist, a historian, a poet, a comedian, a narrative philosopher, a songwriter, a screenwriter — in the search to find the edges of language, the writer finds temptations to learn all the sub-mediums.

It’s hard to write long-form essays without serious, socially-enforced deadlines. The reason my writing group (with Garrett & Yehudis) worked in October, November was because we had shared stakes. We all knew we were publishing on the 1st. Since we were linking to each other, you really can’t miss the train.

How do you render your consciousness honestly? How can you transcend mere fact without getting lost in fanciful prose? Is all mundanity worth logging? Stop by stop, a robot announcer drone-talks the time, and my pointer finger feels foreign as I scratch its side. Who will be at the meetup tonight?

I’ve been noticing that paragraphs are stronger when they close on showing instead of telling. The power of closing on an image is that it requires reader visualization and interpretation. It’s active, it’s open-ended, and it creates a draw to the next paragraph in search of some kind of resolution.

Telling on the other hand is logical, revealing,

“I feel like a detective reading between the lines to figure out what I was really thinking, what I was really feeling.” From a friend re-reading their old blog … Whenever you read back on writing from your past-self, you notice the gap between what’s being said, the underlying tension, and how things actually play out. With foresight, it’s easy to

Charles Dickens

“Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.”

Types of first drafts: printer method, bulleted outline, multiple options, tangent w/ explainer.

What if my essays were read out loud, put on YouTube, and augmented with imagery? Maybe Spotify too? Kind of neat to imagine my body of work across multiple mediums.

I started writing online in July 2020, posted a few essays, and then deleted my website 2-3 months later. There were probably a few reasons for this: 1) I felt like I had to always outdo the quality of my last essay, 2) I was getting caught in “scope balloon” essays and disappearing for long stretches, 3) I was publishing under my full-name, and