I'm getting a different (for me) take on the craft of writing

[UTUSN]

So I'm cleaning up my life. Well, a box of papers dating from 50 yrs back, you know, because every great specimen ought to help out future auto*biographers by saving every scrap. So there's this stuff of acidy, brittle paper, some items with multiple copies (can't be too careful about ensuring against losing one), in a cardboard box disintegrating and gnawed by long deceased varmints, blah blah.

So every 10 or 15 yrs I've gone through it all, winnowed it down, yet ended up with keeping this load of s**t of my life weighing me down.

This time at this age I'm cold blooded about shredding even that archive of copies of letters to that first "great" love. I'm skimming every page and anything with that name is being separated and even shredded.

Anyway, as I'm reading bits from my 20s and 30s, I've gotten onto this topic of the Writing racket. My accepted image of myself is, and has always been, that I am an uncool, nerdy, dweeb. Yet, to read this stuff, I was this mixture of SINATRA and Alan GINSBURG --- so swinging (in my language), so With-It, SO Hip!!!!!1

So this writing thing is about some kind of artificial creation out there, that portrays something *else* totally different from the scribbler who scribbled it and has an existence all its own.

Now, as for the poormouthing Whiner in long passages -- THAT dude I recognize!1


___________________
* Nobody caught this?!1

[femmocrat]

1. Artists are the same, I fear.

I have every art school sketch, every unfinished watercolor, even some childhood projects that my mother saved. I am sure they will end up in the landfill when I depart this planet.

[UTUSN]

2. we gonnna be famous forever!1

[malthaussen]

3. Reminds me of when Zonker decided to donate his papers to Walden.

All I can remember about them now is that they included three long letters from his draft board and two packages of grape kool-aid.

Also reminds me of Jimmy Buffett's song about the poet who lived before his time. Great line: "Had his brother on a talk show, though they never got along." Being "discovered" after one is dead has got to be some kind of cosmic ultimate irony.

-- Mal

[UTUSN]

4. Yip, my immortality is pitiful. Now then, my Mortality is something else again. n/t

[UTUSN]

5. This time around, I put a really big dent in that box o'crap!1

Whoa, that navel-gazing went on and on, decades and counting, and now *so* EWwww-worthy!1 Not at all like the more erratic of my DU posts, cough.

Yet, much resistance to growing the pile for shredding -- what an artist is lost, as my pal Nero said. Poor shredder, once going at it, the more I overload the motor.

The worst part is how much there was of which I have NO MEMORY. But some actually gripping descriptions (father/surgery/death).

[CBGLuthier]

6. I once read in a book on writing that the narrator of a story

even if it is an invisible narrator that is not a character in the story, is still a character as stylistic decisions and language choices create the character of the narrator as surely as dialog and actions define the other characters.

[UTUSN]

7. So... I'm really this SINATRA-GINSBURG person, not nerd/dweeb?!1 n/t