My Writerly Blog

My plan for yesterday was to spend the entire day immersed in the beta for the Electronic Literature Directory's new site , and post about it here. Unfortunately, I woke up feeling as though gnomes had scoured my throat with steel wool, and had then smacked me between the eyes with a sledgehammer. It was all I could do to hold my head up. So I didn't. I whined a bit until the husband left to do some work, and then I plugged in the 3-hour "Dangerous Days: Making of Blade Runner" DVD extra. I'm in the midst of thinking about how visual storytelling can add depth to the narrative, and as Blade Runner is such a key narrative in terms of visual storytelling in the film medium, I thought I'd write a paper on it with another PhD in my department. In between bouts of passing out, then waking up and having to rewind and rewatch segments, I gained a lot of information about how the film was made, how the story was put together, who contributed what, what the thought...

My day yesterday was full of discovery. I learned things about people, and rather than smiling and nodding and thinking to myself "Wow, people really suck for not being just like me," I actually absorbed some ideas about people's differences. I know. I think I'm growing as a person. I lecture my students all the time about how everyone's writing process is different, that every writer has to find his/her process, develop it, and go with what works best for the individual. I just never applied that thinking to regular people, i.e., nonwriters. Hell, it sometimes even shocks me to talk to actual writers (NOT students writing their first short stories, which are inevitably about ghosts, or child abuse, or rape, or all of the above), and find their processes are drastically different from mine. I start thinking that way about the rest of my life, too. My husband and I have lived together for years, and I never understood how every single morning his toiletries ar...