I Don't Do All That

Writing Has To Do With Truth-telling. When You're Writing, Let's Say, An Essay For A Magazine, You Try To Tell The Truth At Every Moment. You Do Your Best To Quote People Accurately And Get Everything Right. Writing A Novel Is A Break From That: Freedom. When You're Writing A Novel, You Are In Charge; You Can Beef Things Up.

From My Music Training, I Knew That, Some Spanish Rhythms Apart, 5/4 Is A Time Signature Used Only In The Modern Era. Holst's Mars From The Planets Is 5/4. But If You Speak Lines Of Poetry In That Pattern You Just End Up Hitting The Off-beats. It's Only When You Add A Rest - A Sixth Beat - That It Sounds As It Surely Should Sound.

It's Troubling To See How Often Winston Churchill Is A Proponent Of Massive Programs That Are Really Aimed At Civilians - Starvation Blockades And Chemical Warfare Stockpiles And So On.

Wikipedia Flourished Partly Because It Was A Shrine To Altruism.

A Problem That I Have With Everything Fictional Is That Writers Are Always Having To Come Up With Sudden Artillery Explosions In The Middle Of Whatever Is Going On. The Characters Are Having Interesting, Subtle Interactions, Or Jealousies, Or Whatever It Is, And Suddenly Some Gigantic Angry Eruption Has To Happen, A Giant Gasp Where Everyone Has To Scramble Around. That's The Point Where I'm Turned Off. I Want The Dynamic Range To Be A Little Smaller. I Don't Like The Big False Bangs.