A while ago Sparkly convinced me to get a Twitter

And so I’ve gone around looking up famous-ish people (mostly authors) to follow. That seems to be the main advantage of Twitter over other social media. It’s seemingly low-effort, so lots of people use it who otherwise don’t have very much presence online.

I’m wary of getting into big discussions on Twitter, because of the confusing nature of threads of discussion, and also because character limits tempt me to be really concise at the expense of being understandable.

So I expect I’ll use it for three things:
1. Finding out about new books
2. Talking about books I’m reading
3. Supporting the occasional hashtag campaign.

I’ve been referring to Sparkly with ey/em pronouns in my thoughts as well as on this blog for a while now. People say it takes a certain number of weeks to create a habit, and I think I’ve reached that point. At first I overcorrected and thought “wait, I mean ‘ey'” every time I referred to anyone as “she” in my head, but I seem to have settled in.

I don’t think there’s any chance of my accidentally saying it out loud. There’s a fair amount of separation between my internal monologue and things I intend to say.

The problems I had/have with writing kind of feel the same as the problems I have with art.

(Which are: I can see how lines and shading suggest 3D objects. I can also see lines etc. as 2D areas of color on a page. I find it really hard to switch back and forth between the two views and figure out exactly how the suggestion of 3D shapes happens.)

I can understand what I’m writing in the spontaneous order that it comes to me.

Or I can try to organize it in a top-down sort of way that will work as a straightforward explanation for people who don’t have all the context in my head.

But it’s hard to get everything from one state into the other. I’ve gotten a lot better at dealing with this– at juggling points around and deciding what order they should go in, at rephrasing things to be more straightforward.

I can even write with an eye to things that will sound good, sometimes, things that would flow smoothly when spoken aloud.

But actually trying to imagine other people reading my writing, and what they might think of it, is a whole other (mind-boggling) thing.

This book about crime (that Sparkly checked out from the library) has a lot of useful and accurate facts, but I could really do without the coating of “depraved!” “psychopath!” etc.
Even if I didn’t disagree with some of the ideas behind those words, they lay it on really thick, and it’s pretty clear they’re just trying to make things sound more shocking.

Just had a thought re: writing

The fact that I think one of my writing styles is very similar to the style of an author I like. That should probably be more meaningful to me than it is. Like, you would expect that to inspire me to write more in that style? And it doesn’t at all.

I’m just not interested? in writing things like that?

I guess I associate my wordy talky colloquial style with nonfiction, and with trying to be accessible and easy to understand. So even knowing that plenty of other people like to read stories where the narrator’s voice is like that, and even knowing that I enjoy stories where the narrator’s voice is like that, still doesn’t really make it interesting to me.

The kind of writing I both like and want to emulate is much more poetic and metaphorical. That kind of style is more personal and more emotional for me, and I usually feel like I have to make it clearer and less metaphorical to allow other people to understand it. So the idea of being able to keep that style is more exciting to me.