Tag Archives: writing

William Gibson's new blog

I’ve been enjoying William Gibson’s new weblog a great deal (and not just for the cheap thrill of finding we have some of the same books on the bedside table).

I found his meditation on Timothy Leary, drugs, and writing both touching and amusing. I’ve certainly long agreed with him on this point:

Leary once told me that he thought that the best single piece of advice he could give to a writer was to either write stoned and edit sober, or vice versa. For me, functionally and organically, composition and revision are aspects of one process, territories on a continuum. The need to chemically define two individual states seems anything but a shortcut. The journey out from baseline and back seems a waste of time, when, if you accept that one cannot step twice into the same Heracletian river, simply waiting a while will have the same effect. The Heracletian “you” that returns to the task is not the “you” that put it down earlier. That, to me, is the easier shortcut. Of course, if one were really inducing that state only because one enjoyed it, and wished to repeat it, that would be something else.

I’m not averse to having a glass of wine while writing, but really I find that a little time and distance from a piece brings enough change in self to give me the fresh eyes that I need. Inebriation? Not a useful working tool, at least not for me.

this site may be doomed

I’m sharing a grad student office with a nuclear physics PhD candidate and she’s really nice but she comes in and while she’s thinking, she stares intensely in my direction when I’m writing and mumbles under her breath, which I find slightly stifling, creatively speaking. The upside to this is that I’m very focused while I’m there and getting a lot of labwork done instead of dawdling in the office. The downside is that I’ve been neglecting my blog. My home connection is very slow and I don’t blog from my (work) office computer.

If things go dark here for a while, don’t write me off. I’ll be back.

epiphany

I know you’re all sick and tired of hearing about grad school, but I had an epiphany I just had to share.

To briefly recap: My advisor convinced me that taking the fiction screenwriting class would be useful to me in my non-fiction writing.

My epiphany isn’t that he’s right, although he probably is.

My epiphany is that it draws much less attention when you make phonecalls for research purposes if you identify yourself as a fiction writer than if you call and say you’re an anthropologist.

I hope so, anyway, because I imagine that otherwise calls about whether, hypothetically speaking, a pet mummifier could also mummify a person and then disguise the remains to look like a large dog would attract much less attention from, oh say, law enforcement, if the person was just doing research for a movie.

That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.