Pretending to Write

The Visible Woman...writes.

At some point after I retired I printed some business cards on the laser printer that had, below my name, "Pretending to Write, But Really Just Blogging." I was a pretty assiduous blogger for a while, too. Then it collapsed. At about the same time I started tweeting. I took a red pen to some of those cards and struck out 'write' and wrote 'blog.' And I struck out 'blogging' and wrote 'tweeting.' It was sad but true. I like looking back at my old journal/blog entries with their attempts at focus and, in some cases, incredible detail. The twitter archive and facebook timelines are fun in the same way. But it's harder to dig in and figure out just what was in your head and heart.

Now I tweet and tweet some more. I connect my tweets to facebook and they appear there, too. Occasionally I upload pictures to facebook directly. I share, I comment, I retweet. If I wasn't committed to Holidailies that's all I'd be doing.

Tweeting is interesting. I usually have something to say. I want to say it in one tweet breath of 140 characters. I type it out. And...it's too long. Sometimes by a lot. (See above.)

Then I edit.

And edit again and again and again and finally tweet and then it appears on facebook.

Along the way, articles, proper punctuation and spelled out conjunctions are sacrificed. You regret you didn't use one of the spare characters to put a comma between a couple of words. And then you say to yourself: how could anyone possibly care about this 'writing.' My English Textbook for my freshman year in college was called Writing with a Purpose. This sort of publishing was never anticipated! Of course, neither were blog entries of self-indulgent detail like this one. And what, after all, is the purpose?

Writing or Typing?

This reflection of me and himself was taken at Barney's, I believe, on our recent trip to NYC.

The Visible Woman...writes.

What does it mean to write. Is it just typing? Do you have to have coherent sentences? Or not? Are fragments OK? Should you spell it 'okay?' Should all the letters/phrases/sentences add up to something. Just how important is conventional use of punctuation? I noticed early on in online journals (blogs now) that sometimes a casual emphasis was added by radical period stops. Every. Single. Time. I saw that usage it impressed me as something invented online which I never saw in print. Oh...maybe somewhere in Joyce's Ulysses but he did tend to running along without a single period. "yes I said yes I will Yes." Breathless that.

Since I fell hard off the blogging bandwagon and started tweeting (with an app connection to facebook sending the tweets there) I have abandoned the paragraph. Sometimes even the complete sentence. (Although once my thoughts or those of others and some pictures arrive on facebook I may run on and on.)

But I've not lost the desire to communicate, to write (type?) something with meaning. To reveal rather than fragment or obscure. To encapsulate at least one idea. To comment on current events. (OK, okay, in my pictures, as above, I tend to fragments, obscurity and received reality.)

From July 2009, early in my twitter career, I offer a couple of old tweets to show you what I mean. (Points for knowing the current event implied in that first one.)

Later I think I'll write (type?) about working within the restricted space of 140 characters without breaking my rules for writing so completely that I become disgusted. And I may also write later about typos. Argh. Ugh. There is lots of time and space in this holidailies stream after all!