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Writing is a solitary pursuit--the imagination guiding the hand moving the pen. I'm pretty old-school, valuing the work of good editors and the revisions process before letting my words go public. But life is short, right? And sometimes, just sometimes, we need to spout off.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Eat, Pray, Blog

Saturday morning: scanning the Globe Books section and the Chronicle Herald. Great to see Lezlie Lowe as a regular Herald columnist, her commentary on the Truro mayor's gay-bashing. And on the religion page a piece by a journalism student on the conflict between Capitalism and Christianity. Then, in the Globe, a review of Elizabeth Gilbert's new memoir about the scariness of saying "I do". The need, in all three scenarios, for commitment to compassion. Caritas.
I admire Gilbert and other such memoirists their ability to write so blatantly of their own lives and feelings. Words are a wonderful way of processing personal fodder, but, frankly, the thought of such direct commentary gives me the willies. I always prefer to take the fictional leap into the imaginary drop-off, and to stretch what presents itself to me into the minds and hearts of other people: characters.
A different kind of honesty, perhaps, but from the same place.
The hardest thing about writing, I tell students, is saying exactly what you mean. Sometimes (a lot of times?) we're not even sure what that is ourselves. Writing is a pretty good way of finding out; but then it's finding the right words.
Writing is the place, maybe, where our true feelings and what we would aspire to believe occasionally meet.
A point of double vision: our humble and higher selves conversing.

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