Work spares us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
-Voltaire
Some writers feel that blogging drains too much creativity and hinders their “real” writing. Others feel that blogging can absorb so much time that they devote hours to posts about their cat instead of revising that novel.
Truer words were never spoken. Blogging, like journaling, is addictive. It’s also esoteric. Many diaries develop a private language all their own, and invariably that bleeds over into other writing as well. In the case of blogging though there is the additional sense of urgency because people are waiting for that next post… Well, at least in theory there are people waiting. Sometimes I wonder if I am just writing for the Googlebot, and then I wonder if it enjoys what it finds
The drama of our time is the coming of all into one fate A Tribe is Forming - One Touch Handshake
Best Advice:
It's better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not.
It's better to fail at something you love, than to succeed at something you don't.
Everyone is always offering advice on everything. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received? What's the worst (and why)?
A journal is the perfect place to learn the ways in which language communicates authenticity as opposed to the way language is a tool used by political, advertising and marketing coalitions to make us purchase something, to make us hate this group or that one, and to make us look through blurry eyes at the daily transgressions against freedom and humanity. Learning the authenticity of your own voice makes it harder and harder to write in an inauthentic voice or listen to one; it makes it harder to believe what others want you to believe against your will."
The best advice I have ever been given was not to give unsolicited advice because it falls on deaf ears an makes people defensive. The worse advice I ever got was unsolicited advice, it made me really defensive.
• All Colours ...
• · Your journal is your private place … no more ;-)
Via Email from writers of note:
Body English. Write a “conversation” in which no words are said. This exercise is meant to challenge you to work with gesture, body language (or, as a baseball announcer I heard once misspeak it, body English), all the things we convey to each other without words. We often learn more about characters in stories from the things characters do with their hands than from what they say. It might be best to have some stranger observe this conversation, rather than showing us the thoughts of one of the people involved in the conversation, because the temptation to tell us what the conversation is about is so great from inside the conversation. “I was doing the opposite of Freud,” Desmond Morris says, of his famous book The Naked Ape that first studied the ways humans speak with their bodies. “He listened to people and didn’t watch; I watched people and didn’t listen.” Because of Morris, according to Cassandra Jardine, “when politicians scratch their noses they are now assumed to be lying—and the sight of the Queen [Elizabeth] crossing her legs at the ankles is known to be a signal that her status is too high for her to need to show sexual interest by crossing them further up.” Autistic children cannot understand human conversation even when they understand individual words because they cannot read facial expressions, which is clear evidence of how important other forms of language are. 600 words.
The First Lie. Tape-record a conversation. It’s a tried and true method of understanding how people talk, but still surprisingly effective. Obtain permission of the people you are taping. Instruct your group each to tell one small lie during the session, only one lie. Tell them, if they get curious, that some philosophers think that deception was a crucial learned behavior in the emergence of modern consciousness several thousand years ago. You can participate in the conversation yourself, but don’t become an interviewer. Let the machine run for a good long while, allowing your friends to become comfortable and less aware of the tape recorder. Listen to the tape a day or two later. Play it several times. Choose some small part of the conversation to transcribe (the lies may be interesting, if you can spot them, but more interesting should be all the other stuff they say). Transcribe as faithfully as you can. Do not transcribe more than one page of talk. After that, fill out the conversation with information about the people who are speaking, giving us only details about them that we need to know. The final product should be no longer than two pages long, double-spaced.