Facebook for Readers

"A good writer is not necessarily a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender." - Jim Bishop

Although I am on Facebook, I must confess that I am not dedicated to it. I am a Farmville failure. I didn't know it was possible to kill plants on the Internet. I have Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, but I find these even less attractive. I'd rather write, read or knit than spend time updating my profile. That is, until I found  http://www.goodreads.com Goodreads is Facebook for readers. Basically it is a place where I can torture myself by seeing all the many books I lust for, but will never read, particularly if I spend time on Goodreads. It's like looking inside of a bakery window while being on a diet. Isn't it better to just keep walking? 

Keeping Fresh

"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."
— Ernest Hemingway

A writer friend recommended Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.  The book is a banquet, beckoning me to taste some tender morsels and go back for more at a later date. I feel both pleasure and pain as I read it, like looking at a glorious world through a window. I am somewhat bound by the reality that I can’t seem to find enough time to read all the books I want to AND write all the things I want to. Other moments I feel like I am cheating, as I read a paragraph of Flannery O’Connor followed by a bit of Hemingway. Sweet stuff.

Writing Fundamentals

I am officially a writing geek - sort of. I managed either to avoid grammar and composition classes in school or not pay attention. Consequently, I am learning grammar rules on the job. (Thank you friends and editors.) The geek part is that I stuck a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style in my purse and read it whenever I found myself in a waiting room. On page 69, I found this gem: " Writing is, for the most, laborious and slow. The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, the writer must cultivate patience, working many covers to bring down one partridge."

I don't particularly like the hunting references, but I think this sums it up. Show up and be patient. The rest falls into place.

More Six-Word Memoirs

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write. - Nicholas Boileau

The hardest writing assignment I’ve ever had started with a 1000-word patient fact sheet that had to be reduced to a 250-word piece written for the 5th-grade level. It took me a long time to write that. I appreciate brevity, but do not seem to have a natural gift for it. Just ask my daughter - she says I leave the longest voicemail messages. She claims it is sufficient to say your name, followed by, call me back.

Six-Word Memoirs keep popping up all over the place (see http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords/ or January 9 blog posting). These are fun. Here are a couple more I wrote:

Old diary. Pages of adolescent pain.

Used to drink. Now I smile.