~ David Brin
If there was something missing, he didn't see it. Not for a while, at any rate. Life was something to be experienced to the fullest, and because of this there was a large fraction of time that he spent simply living. The affairs of the daily routine were about all that mattered; putting one foot in front of the other, worrying less and less about whether or not there was actually anything greater taking place. After all, bills must be paid, food must be procured, clothes must go on ones back. These are inescapable facts, and no one was more aware of this than he was.
Life cannot continue in this fashion for too long for someone like him, though. At some point, he discovered that the only way to break free from the dismal gray that life had become was to pursue the things that he found most interesting; to explore beyond what had, until this point, been self-taught, or learned through some sort of social means. As this new reality became clearer to him, it seemed odd that this had taken so long. It seemed strange that this wasn't always the case, and so he spent a lot of time looking back on life as it was before. Alas, looking back to things as they once were is always a tricky thing to do. The mind doesn't always recall things as they happened, putting words and situations into an order that they may not have actually happened in. Luckily, he was beyond worrying about such things.
This was the moment. This was the exact time and place that he needed to be in for the dice to roll and come up in that perfect set of numbers. This could not have happened at any other point in time, or in any other geographical location. In some way, he knew, it had all been leading up to this.
So without hesitation or worry, completely free of regret or uncertainty, he opened the door and stepped through it....
Okey-doke, with all three in the stable, I can see that you tried it first more or less straight, then with a bit of English on it, and finally let the assignment spin into outer space, where your autobio as a writer becomes, instead, a commentary on the writer's thought process and sense of life.
ReplyDeleteFair enough. I'm much less likely to bitch that you scanted my assignment than that you didn't dig into or around it enough. But you're a digger, no doubt. Or, if you prefer, a stepper through doors.
Here's where we may butt heads: there will be days when your style will sail close to the edge but stay on track and amaze because it can stay on the edge but not fall off; others when it will go over the edge into the Biddixzone and pffft.
You will resist me those days, but your feeble struggles will be useless when I say that you need fewer words, more focus, more looking outside and less inside, and so on.
Another way of saying the same thing is that with strong writers, their strengths, taken too far, become weaknesses, and they have to become aware of how much is enough, how much is too much. I am not much of a believer in Blake's "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." More a 'moderation in all things' type.
Okay. I understand the point that you're making and will keep it mind when writing this next week's assignments. Speaking of which, I should really hop on that.
ReplyDeleteDon't listen to me too hard, or not anyway yet--I'll be clear if I think you've got a problem.
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