One of the problems with telling other people’s stories is that you bear the responsibility for the telling. Technology invites each of us to tell our story in many mediums. When is it stealing? When is it exploitation? When is it empathy? When is it giving the gift of meaning–the only gift writers have to give? Language, that puckish knave, can sometimes express meaning well outside of the writer’s good intentions. That is why to write is both brave and foolish. For me, the act of empathizing with another human, of becoming them in my imagination, of wresting meaning from brash reality, that is the payoff.
Still, times change. We must listen to others and take heed. Here: http://nyti.ms/1XRvsz8
One way of appreciating the style of a writer is to consider what they have not written. Just as we may judge a scene for its content, we may also judge a scene for what has been omitted and the power that comes from the absence of information. For this I have to think of chapter five of The Great Gatsby in which the narrator Nick Carraway hosts the first meeting in five years between Daisy and Jay Gatsby.
Recent Posts
- Coming Soon…
- A Prayer for the Panther
- Meme Level 10
- “You Can Have Daughters and Accost Women without Remorse.”
- The Sun is a god. Isn’t that obvious?
- Worth Listening: Carl Jung’s “The Undiscovered Self”
- We’ve Got to Fulfill the Book
- No (Wo)Man is An Island
- Self-Reliance
- A City and A Tower
- Monday is no time for Rumination
- The Gas Line
- The Genius of an Age
- Replace the Word “God” with “Monday.”
- A Time for Garrison Keillor
Tags
advice aesthetics Animation Art Books Carl Jung Corpse Flower Covid-19 Descartes Donald Trump Facebook Fear Fiction Film food Hemingway Investing John Berger Johns Hopkins Jordan Peterson Literacy literary Literature New York Pennsylvania Philosophy Poetry Politics Psychology Publishing Reading Reddit Robert Frost Saul Zaentz Science Fiction Screenwriting Story SXSW Tao Te Ching Teaching techniques unwritten Virtual reality writing YouTube