Literary Exercise # 3: A London Morning

One of the better skills of a writer is being concise. It's damn hard to do, and not even fun. Writers seem to be stricken with the illness to write beautifully, but readers are wary of the contagion of boredom, and will often not read your work to avoid the risk. How do you engage the audience without resorting to hypnosis? How do you keep their attention when, as a culture, we have moved back to an oral tradition? Well, by being damn good. By being good. Being good. Cut, cut, cutting, and snip, snip, snipping your words to the essentials. How? Rewrite. William Zinsser, in his book On Writing Well, said that the key to writing is rewriting. I'm liable to agree with him. And if I'm ever contaminated with that debilitating disease, I will be liable. I hope to never be the cause of that infection.

I named this exercise "A London Morning" to avoid copyright issues over "London Fog" but to get at the same idea. In it, I will be writing a paragraph(s) without paining myself to be concise, and then go back with my scissors and trim all the excess verbiage. Sounds good? Hedge trimmers are for more than just haircuts:

The weird thing about listening to an AC unit at 2:30 in the AM is that pretty soon it doesn't seem like you're listening to it anymore...it's more like it was always there...and people and noises blend in and out. It's like speaking with a fan-voice...that warbly, vibrato voice that sounds like it was sampled by regina spektor. It reminds me of when I was growing up in Minnesota. We lived on the river, and the trains ran on the other side. Every time their horn would blare I would swear that they were a part of me. The trains are you. A part of your experience, a part of your identity. Maybe that's why I like backgroud noise...low murmurs, street traffic, refrigerator hums...they all can be identified with...or maybe they identify with you.