2001-04-21 - 11:59 p.m.

Dissatisfied

Well, it's happening again - I'm falling behind on my Uberhamster entries. It's not that I'm hugely busy doing other things, it's for a reason that actually is typical - I'm hung up on a piece of writing. I started to work on a rant about a book - the latest edition of the Comic Book Price Guide, and got all muddled up. Because I seem unable to mold it into anything coherent - or even figure out what it is I really want to say, this journal is at a standstill. I'm going to put that particular entry aside and try to move on. Hopefully it will appear here later.

In my last entry I mentioned that I was reading a book called Writing With Power and it actually is helping me see what's wrong with my writing, or rather the way I write, and how I might fix it.

One of the things that I am least satisfied with is how I end my entries. In fact, many of them don't end, they just stop. This is one way to end a story - just type "THE END." Then, go in the kitchen and get a beer.

Of course, that's a lazy-ass way to do things. But again there is the question: how much hard work do I want to make this? When I was keeping a private journal, I discovered that I could natter on endlessly about the minutiae of the day and produce very long entries that would drive your average reader insane with boredom. It was fun to string words together in amusing ways, but it was rather empty of interesting ideas.

I don't want to just chronicle day to day events, I want to say things on topics that I care about. And that is what makes the writing hard.

Sigh. There is still much work to do.

However, I did notice something amusing while I was reading the book. In a chapter on "revising" the author made a comment that during a rough draft if you wrote something particularly fine you could cut and paste it in the final draft with glue and scissors.

Glue and scissors? How terribly barbaric and clumsy! I flipped to the front of the book and looked at the publishing date. It was 1981! Oops! So a lot of what this guy says about revising is not relevant, thanks to the wonderful technology of the word processing program. I hope the author is alive to see how much easier it makes writing.

He also made the comment that it's good to find a "public forum" for your casual writing, and I can think of no better forum than the World Wide Web. It saves you the trouble of finding a scholarly journal. I hope he's around to see that, too.

However, with all that in mind maybe the book should be called "Writing Without Power."