icyblog v1.3.0
My basic theory is that good writing has passion/connection/heart/SOMETHING and I don't know how to call it, but that's what it is. While good writing has many things, bad writing lacks at least that.
Joe, Y. is a tool if he thinks you've no passion. Your story is lovely, it has craft, and rythym, and you should write more. If all you need is to be told to write, then I am hereby ordering you to write a short story of no less than 2500 words, by next friday.
p.s. send me that whole story please.
I think the bit shared is incredibly economical in its style and achieves much much much in very short order. The lick of the wall is simply a moment of pure writing brilliance. In a paragraph I know those people (in that moment). WAH!, indeed.
If I might, I think what Mark might be thinking is that good writing connects with the reader on those points we all share as human. It is that shared humanity (or inhumanity) that makes art. The rest becomes merely words, no matter how wonderfully arranged or entertaining.
That's awesome you two get to connect and talk about writing! Yes, write more, please!
Joe, You are filled with passion. Stop repressing it. Close your eyes and release it!
And, for Christ's sake --- get to writing.
Those two pieces are wonderful, sad, real -- and, yep, quite passionate.
...Icy, my ass! The thaw has started. Maybe it's global warming. But, whatever it is --- Write it, Work it and Live it for all it's worth!
thanks for the encouragement, y'all!
This got me hot. Incorporate another man in the situation and I'd be hooked!
You're writing is strong and evocative and I'd love to read more Jo.
I guess I should have checked your blog more recently. What a great post.
I've said it privately and I'll say it here: you underrate your writing abilities. I find that writing follows systems of its own internal weather, its own seasons. For example, I've barely been writing short stories for the last couple of years. This has been a little alarming. Now they seem to be coming back to me. I think I needed to get through a number of big changes in my life, in order to be ready for a new stage of work that wasn't about the old signature tropes.
Passion in writing is overrated. There's a lot of mythology around writing, and the lives of writers. The idea that writing should be an exalting process isn't complete bullshit, because sometimes that exaltation does manifest itself. It's the exception, though; not the rule. I find that the best moments in writing come from making good progress, rather than from the intoxicated sense of a story pouring out of me. It's a mistake to seek that intoxication in every act of writing, and it's a mistake to think that feeling plugged into the creative core of the universe is a state in which it's desirable to operate more than occasionally. When it comes, it comes. When it doesn't, making small but consistent steps toward a finished piece of work is the best and only thing to do.
I wrote a good bit of The Concrete Sky in a creative white heat. Ditto some of the stories in Black Shapes in a Darkened Room. I wrote An Ideal for Living from the depths of the worst period of my adult life. There are highs and lows, but I keep writing in the middle, too. It seems to work for me.
If there was a point to all that (how long can these comments be?) it's that if you want to write, at some point you have to make a conscious decision to JUST DO IT.
You know how to set your comments section on fire.
come back to the 5 & Dime blog, icey blog, icey blog!
I can hear the rebel crowd chanting: "new post! new post! new post!"
...hard to refuse an angry crowd. Look what happened to Kirsten as Marie!
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