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Posts in "Books"

Happy World Goth Day! I’m GothEnough and if you want to be, so are you! If you are Not-a-Goth or not goth, you can still celebrate. 📚

🔖🎵🎭📚 Read 8 Musicals that You Might Not Know Were Based on Books by Emily Neuberger.

I’ve been grieving the fact that public performances likely won’t be a thing for the next couple of years. I grieve it both as an audience member and as a performer. Neuberger’s book is going on my to-read list, as her main character’s early experiences with musicals are nearly identical to mine. The musicals and books she writes about are now on my radar if they weren’t, or things I’m going to make a point to revisit if I was already familiar with them.

I bet Neuberger’s book would pair well with The Secret Life of the American Musical, which acts as a Poetics for musicals, describing their shared structural features.

📚 Reading Notes, Having Trouble Reading, and a Read What You Own Challenge

I added a page to the index section of my Bullet Journal that tracks Reading Notes. I don’t like to use collections; I inevitably end up ignoring them. So Reading Notes get stuck in my notebook on the day that I did the reading, and then I add the book title to the Reading Notes bit of the index, along with the numbers of pages where I’ve taken notes on that book.

Here are all the books that one might consider me to be “currently” reading right now:

  • Getting Started in Consulting
  • Dracula - a gorgeous edition illustrated by [Edward Gorey]
  • Ghostlands
  • Moby Dick
  • Writing with Power
  • A Choir of Lies
  • How to Do Nothing
  • Jim Henson: The Biography
  • The Artist’s Way
  • Steal Like an Artist

I’ve actually finished reading at least 5 books in the past couple of months, which is impressive, I think. But I’m really having trouble deciding which one to read at any given time. So I still count this as having trouble reading.

Austin Kleon has some advice for if you are having trouble reading. I think I will pay attention to it. I’ve been doing some of these things, but I might benefit from doing even more.

Leonie Dawson challenged herself to only read books she had in her home before buying any new ones. I’ve been flirting with this challenge but I think it might not be right for the current moment. I don’t know. I do have a lot of awesome books lying around.

Low energy + high pain = reading about ghosts while lying on a hammock. 👻📚

📚 finished reading The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White

This is a re-read; I read The Elements of Style when I was Managing Editor for LEARN NC. I picked it up again because I’ve created a writing/editing/research comm syllabus for myself (more on that in another post).

Most of the rules here are things I do in my writing intuitively and have for years, but there are always a few gems to pull out, especially from the final chapter about style.

Writing, to be effective, must follow closely the thoughts of the writer, but not necessarily in the order in which those thoughts occur. (p. 15)

This is such a strong argument for freewriting and Ann Lamott’s shitty first draft. You get the thoughts out of you and only then do you figure out what order they should be in. (Huh. I didn’t realize Peter Elbow developed freewriting as a practice. I’m currently reading his book, Writing with Power.)

Never imitate consciously, but do not worry about being an imitator; take pains instead to admire what is good. (p. 70)

This reminds me of Austin Kleon’s exhortation to steal like an artist, as well as his thoughts about the relationship between input and output.

With respect to the place of feelings in writing, Strunk and White argue that a design, or structure for writing, tends to be incompatible with feelings, because

one’s feelings do not usually lend themselves to rearrangement. (p. 71)

This can certainly be the case, but I don’t think emotion-driven writing and highly-structured writing are incompatible. Poetry is a good place for structure and emotion together. (Joss Whedon once said in an interview that his writing process is about structure and emotion.)

Look at sonnets, for example. Whether Petrarchan, Shakespearean, or otherwise, they are highly structured and often draw on emotion. See for a specific example, my favorite of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or a more modern sonnet my friend wrote, or Sir Patrick Stewart reading a sonnet a day.

Revising is part of writing. (p. 72)

I know. I know. I really struggle with this. For all that I’m a proponent of freewriting and an initial round of revision, I really struggle with later rounds.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing. (p. 84)

Yes! Trust your audience to be smart.

The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. (p. 85)

This reminds me of another bit of Austin Kleon advice, to write the book you want to read. I recently finished reading Wallace J. Nichols’s book, Blue Mind (more on that in another post), and joined a Zoom call he had to discuss his upcoming plans for 100 Days of Blue Mind. He said that Blue Mind was a book he’d wanted someone else to write so that he could read it, but he couldn’t find it, so he wrote it. (He also said, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might start out studying marine biology and end up studying neuroscience.”)

I’m glad to have re-read The Elements of Style. I feel like people joke about it a lot, but I think it’s a useful little book.

🎵🎭📚 You know that feeling when you’re irritated that you have to feed your family instead of just reading Stephen Sondheim’s annotation of his lyrics for the rest of the night? No? Just me, then? (If you haven’t yet, go watch this concert.)