I was actually v. productive at work today, much to my shock; I figured that I would go in and spend the whole day dreaming of my new laptop, or egg poaching, or a white Christmas, but I managed to ignore all of those desires in the name of being a good little capitalist. However, I did get a package in the mail today that made me positively thrum with happiness--a small box from pendemonium.com, containing a new fountain pen and several bottles of gorgeous ink. The fountain pen is a green brushed aluminum, made by Lamy (a German pen company), and meant to be relatively disposable--not that you would use it and throw it away, but that it's not as expensive as a 'real' pen and so not as devastating if you happen to lose it. Since I was so close to losing my favorite pen this weekend (it was in the purse that was stolen, but I took it out at the last minute and left it in the console beside the driver's seat instead), it's nice to have this one, which I can take anywhere and trust that it will survive unintentional damage. I bought two of the inks mostly for the bottles; there's an American company called Noodler's that makes inks for foreign markets as well, and Pendemonium happened to have a couple of inks that were made for those markets--namely, Russia and India. I felt that this was fate, and so I ordered 'Tchaikovsky' (magenta-purple) and 'Upper Ganges' (blue)--no prizes will be given for correctly guessing which market matches each ink, other than a brief round of sarcastic applause. I love the bottles; all of the words are in Russian (which I can sort of make out) or Hindi (which I certainly can't), and colors are lovely. I also got 'Tianamen' (a dark red), and a classic blue color that flows very smoothly and will probably become my default ink for regular tasks.
I figure that if my brother can write endless posts about Chevy trucks, I can subject all y'all to a running monologue about inks and writing implements. But enough of that; let's move on.
Tonight I finished reading 'On Becoming a Novelist' by John Gardner. Now I want to go out and read 'Grendel', which I had borrowed from Claude for a couple of years but never got around to opening. Gardner taught writing at several colleges over the years, and the book I just finished ended up becoming a classic book for creative writing classes, perhaps more famous than his 'real' stuff. It was all quite interesting; he talked a lot about talent and how to improve it, whether and how workshops are helpful, what to do about the reality that you will probably never make it financially as a novelist (his advice: find a v. generous spouse--ha!), etc. The most interesting thing for me was getting insight into how his writing process worked--he was the type of writer who would agonize for days or months over a few lines of text, and he referenced one case where he wrote 200 pages of manuscript, couldn't figure out why one paragraph wasn't working, realized it was because it didn't fit with the other 200 pages, and so threw them out and started from scratch with that lone paragraph as the sole survivor. Talk about crazy.
If the class that I took this quarter taught me anything, though, it's that there's a lot of value in revision, even if it didn't teach me how to do it. After hearing comments from classmates, there were a lot of things that I recognized I would do differently. As you may know, I tend to procrastinate, and so I never had the luxury of extensive revision in college (including, horror of horrors, my honors thesis). I think I've always gotten by because my writing tends to be lucid on the first attempt, even if it is not particularly concise--and the lucidity propels me to the top of a heap of less-lucid writers, even if it is not the best effort that I can personally put forth. But, I'm going to have to teach myself (or take a class about) how to revise, because I can see how much more striking and wonderful my prose could be if I made it through a first draft and then went back through and polished, looked for new or hidden meanings, and reexamined my word choices.
Now, I'm going to write in my journal a bit before bed. The one bad thing about keeping a journal and a blog both is that I can't always remember what I've written where, with the consequence that I will probably end up repeating myself here even more than usual, or leaving out crucial ramblings that I thought were here but were actually in my journal. It's a good exercise, though--it makes me write more, both in volume and in honesty, and it keeps all of you appraised on whether I'm alive and, if so, what trouble I have most recently gotten myself into. So, look forward to continued (albeit inane) posts in the future. Onward, comrades!
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