Creative Writing, Status Quo and Fucking Corporate Lingo

A woman on television was describing the circumstances which brought about the tornadoes in Garland, Texas.  She was talking of the unusually warm temperature and then said the low-hanging clouds 'added fuel to the fire.'

Lady, it was a pouring rain fucking thunderstorm with tornadoes. There was no fire and nothing added fuel to it.

That type of conversational laziness is apparent just about anywhere and is confirmed every time someone is too slothfully lethargic to find better words than 'awesome' to describe good things or 'horrific' to describe bad ones.  The same laziness brings about corporate lingo in open conversation and brings about mindless cliches such as 'adding fuel to a fire' even when the expression has little to no relationship to the subject.

Girl, if you don't want him lookin' at yer boobs all the time, say something which draws his attention to your eyes.  Pro tip on that:  saying 'awesome' is not going to do it because his awe is for yer boobs.

(Ed:  oh, right.  Blame the bimbo for having boobs!)

There's no blaming bimbos for anything.  She's got some testosterone-soaked high school boy (T-S HSB) on her hands and he keeps looking at her boobs.  She wants to know what to do about that shit.

So, we say consider your words, girl.  If your T-S HSB (as above) cannot follow your words then your best move is to trade him in on one who can because he will never do anything beyond looking at boobs and, wtf, he's probably overcompensating, if you take my meaning.

My friend said he is going to pursue a degree in journalism and that may well be a fine pursuit ... so long as your intention is journalism rather than creative writing.  I've taken courses at uni in both and got little to nothing out of either.  The study of journalism is somewhat more pragmatic in its focus on structure, etc but it's not really the structure which applies to, say, writing a mystery novel.  That type of writing can extend into tech writing but it doesn't do much for writing novels, etc.

My nephew has written a book and I've been doing some editing with him because he has some troubles with something you will never encounter in writing for newspapers or similar media:  writing dialog.  As a writer, he has no trouble in coming up with the dialog but presenting it in a format which is readable by someone else is the key and that one is not easy.

There are many things one may hear about an editor.  Flaming asshole is one and, from the more creative types, you may hear, 'he was buggered so much in private school he started to like it.'

It's not my preference to be a flaming asshole and I definitely have no interest in buggery so it's a delicate thing working with someone else's edits.  I can rip my own material to shit and no ego will get stomped because I do it to myself.  It's quite a different thing doing that for someone else but it's ok here because he sees it's constructive criticism and so we move along.

The biggest trap for a writer is, above all, alcohol and you saw what Dylan Thomas did with it.  Romantics love to say the alcohol or narcotic of choice, etc is part of the art but that's one of the biggest lies and most destructive ideas of all.  You create despite any drugs and definitely not because of them.  It's so important to understand this and so many don't.

When Thomas wrote "Do not go gentle," he was a raving alcoholic and it was written about a year before he died, still drunk as a monkey.  He went just as gently as sick-ass drunk can go.

The second biggest trap is laziness and that's, as above, using expressions such as 'putting fuel on a fire' because the words come quickly and seem to address a situation but, in fact, they don't.  In the example at the top, they make the rest of the expression laughable.  She describes an awful situation in which eleven people died and that marginalizes those personal tragedies by saying something added fuel to it.  Unless God did this shit deliberately, no-one added fuel to anything.

It's not that you need to slow down so the old guy can understand you but rather you need to slow down so you can understand yourself.

(Ed:  oh, that's so Zen and so Freud and ...)

Shut the fuck up.  Live it or reap the inevitable consequence, the worst thing which can befall any human.

(Ed: and what, prithee tell me, is that?)

Being boring, Lighting Boy.  Being boring.