Warm Recollections #10
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
Is life too short to not follow your desires, or too short to screw up what you already have? Discuss.
Go through your prose and take out “I think” or “I believe” wherever it occurs. You communicate belief — and sound far more authoritative — by expressing yourself in clear, declarative sentences. Nothing else is required. Prefixing it turns it into an existential pose or a claim to distinction.
One of the ways children break your heart — and through which you come to love them — is the way they change. Some small and incredibly endearing habit they develop, apparently from nowhere, which then disappears just as quickly.
They cause you to miss them even when they are still here, and that is part of what loving is about.
You don’t know a city until you’ve been drunk in it; and you don’t start to really know it until you’ve been drunk in it by yourself — alone with your thoughts and musings and the city, making a stream of conscious and unconscious decisions about where you are, where you want to be, how safe you are, if you’re okay.
Boys of nineteen are very, very bad at doing things as if they’re no big deal.
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And if you've been drunk alone in a city, and you still love it, love it more fiercely than ever, feel that being alone in it with your thoughts and musings makes your thoughts and musings better, deeper, more sparkling or even darker, but of a shimmering darkness ... then that is Vienna, and you will come to realize that you should move there one day. And though it may take years, one day you will. ---------------- Or one day, I did, at least. That day was in early August, 2023, and I've not come to regret it since. Quite the contrary, I love it more fiercely than ever, its sparkle & its darkness, which is a shimmering one.
Love this format! Balancing a desire for something new with holding on to what you have is sometimes an easy call and often a non-choice. But if it’s not, I’d say go for the dream as long as you love the process of going after it. On balance, most people worry too much about losing non-human, non-essential stuff they’d get over quickly from losing. I know I have.
Show, don’t tell was the first writing rule my daughter told me to follow—but it’s hard. Using think/believe puts space between you and the reader. They feel safer to use. It’s easier to see how they weaken your message if you edit someone else’s writing. A strong writing voice is more satisfying to read. (I just removed 2 I thinks from a draft I’m working on, and it felt good.)