Quarantine Project Day 31
A teaching day today, so got very little writing done. But because I'd been mouthing off yesterday about rhythm in prose I decided to spend a half-hour-or-so window writing in long-hand. I mean on paper. I mean with a pen. Yes! Scratching glyphs on a piece of tree, compressed, pulped and bleached! What a shock to recall how it feels! Like suddenly remembering you know how to speak Latin or Greek. Or that you'd learned marquetry in a passed life.
Guess I just wanted to see if it affected the rhythm of my writing and of course it does. There is such an intimacy in writing with a... well, not a feathered quill, but an implement that whispers to the paper in place of the usual keyboard rattling. But the danger is, like a visit to the fairy realm, time passes differently. The intimate whispering can easily persuade you that those extra adjectives and adverbs have their place after all. And of course they do, under another star, but we all know what happens when you find your way back from the fairy realm: time has rushed by and everyone else has grown old.
As for the teaching of writing, I was in the middle of giving my normal feedback - not harsh, but as clear and balanced and as helpful as I could make it - and I saw that the author of the manuscript under examination, a lovely young woman, was in tears at my comments. Oh God, that's not the idea of teaching. Sometimes I want to say: don't listen to me, just write and then write more, and more again.
Hand-crafted, but perhaps of higher count in another realm: 564 words
(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")
