Practising the art
Well, by now, you - one of the eight reading this blog - should have guessed that this is an echo-chamber, not an auditorium. I'm not really trying to engage an audience just now: I'm trying things out; mainly to see how embarrassed I am by my writing when I read it the next day - always a good measure in my opinion. So, the main things I've found: I over-qualify, use too many adjectives. Half my writing is unwriting. Like embryonic development: where cells are shed from a mitten of undifferentiated flesh to define fingers and thumbs. I have forgotten the rules of grammar for speech. Parenthesised clauses feel like smug little asides from a knowing author to a complicit reader (don't you think?) I enjoy writing sentence by sentence, and risk losing the paragraph's meaning. I want to chop out great screeds of fine writing 1 the morning after. But that wouldn't be in the spirit of blogging this stuff. On the other hand, I've cut some real self-indulgent c...