--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "emptybill" <emptybill@...> wrote: > > I'm thinking "pedestrian" is an adequate summary of his > multiple musings posing as insight.
Not bad as a one-word description, but there's really more to it than that. Just for one thing, a pedestrian writer's work isn't necessarily devoid of self- knowledge, nor is such a writer necessarily careless about logic, or about truthfulness, for that matter. > Perhaps you have a better one but you can save it for a sunny day. > Why waste a good post describing the waifing scent of garbage? Well, 'cause I'm challenging him to do *better*. You know, it occurs to me that perhaps his problem is that he's been stuck for so long making his living writing software documentation--which he *has* to take time and care with, or he'd be fired--that when he writes for his own pleasure, he can't bear to discipline himself to impose the same constraints on his output. I guess that's understandable, if so, but it's a shame. Maybe one way to go would be for him to be selective about what he ends up posting. Write all the unconstrained garbage he wants, but not post it; then pick out a few pieces every week that have some potential and spend a bit of time and effort revising them until they're as good as he can possibly make them, and only then post them. Now that I think about it, I wonder whether his compulsion to write putdowns here is really a matter of displaced anger at having to write nothing but technical stuff at work. Maybe MMY/TM/TMers are just convenient targets on which to let out his frustration at not having the kind of writing career he always dreamed of. I mean, when he first announced years ago that he was moving to Paris, it was supposedly to work on a novel he said he was writing about the Cathars. But we haven't heard anything about that in quite some time. Maybe he should be urged to go back to the novel instead of wasting his time inflicting rubbish on FFL. Maybe raising his sights would unleash some real creativity. Or maybe not... > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@> wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb no_reply@ wrote: > > >> > > > > I write for a living. I am a fast enough typist so that > > > there is almost no lag between what I think and it appear- > > > ing onscreen as text. So I do it for fun. It's a way of > > > concretizing the abstract ideas that flit through my mind, > > > to see whether they have any lasting meaning for me other > > > than as Just Another Flit-Thought. > > > > Trouble is, the ideas that flit through your mind and > > make it into your posts here are generally of pretty > > low quality. They're very often shallow, unfocused, > > and lacking in logic, insight, and above all, self- > > knowledge. > > > > >
