I almost made the title of this post "On Writing," but then I went back and revised it. I've always had a perverse enjoyment of revision, but I've learned this past quarter to be a lot more rigorous about it. One of the most useful things I got out of my writing workshop was practice at figuring out exactly what makes good writing good and bad writing bad. It's tricky. Is it the grammar? The sentence structure? The parallelism (or, in my case, the lack thereof)? Blogging is proving to be an exercise in speed-revision, because I am now much more attuned to my grammatical and structural tendencies (good and bad), and I am constantly editing myself. Not a bad thing, considering that part of my reason for starting this blog was to work out ideas and get myself writing something on a regular basis.
I'm still trying to work out how to end two of the essays in my thesis. I feel like I need to make some conclusions about the nature of original art and mass-reproductions, but I'm being pulled in different directions as to whether I should foreground my argument or my narrative structure. Ideally, my narrative structure would be so sparkling and seamless that it would contain an implicit argument. But this writing business is a helluva lot harder than it looks. I'm not sure how writers of longer works can keep it all together; the revisions I'm dealing with are mind-boggling, and that's just for a measly 30 page paper. One of my peers here said she wanted to see how many drafts, say, David Sedaris goes through on an average essay. She hoped it was at least twenty.
I've now made at least three four revisions to this post. And it's a blog post, for fuck's sake.
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current book: Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative, vol. 1
current music: "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend" by The Magnetic Fields. How do you not love a song with lyrics like, "love or not / i've always got ten guys on whom i can depend / but if you're not mine / one less is nine / get wise / i thought you were my boyfriend" ?
current socks: black with two large carrots on each one, and a rabbit atop each carrot. happy almost easter!
