2024-06-15 Journal Entry

Created: June 15, 2024 8:57 PM Tags: Daily

The words we cling to are the words we don’t actually believe. The quotes we pin up on the walls, our mantras, they’re the things we say because we aspire to believe them, despite not believing them yet. It’s our little kinds of faith, or hope that we’ll want or think something different and then things will be okay.

And of course we can nudge our way to richer or more varied worldviews, but they’re usually not as epiphanic as we believe them to be. They’re things we win by fighting tooth and nail, especially when it seems like there’s nowhere for us to go.

Anyways, I really want to get back into doing morning pages — even though it’s, err, 4pm right now — and writing a bunch of stuff every day. I find that I’ve started to keep a lot of thoughts pent up in my brain. I’m not going to set a word target for these. Instead, I’ve just set a timer for 20 minutes and we’ll see what happens. Previously, I could do 750 words in about 12-15 minutes if I was really cranking out the words, so this gets me in that same ballpark, but 20 minutes feels like a good amount of time and it makes me not have to stop and look at the word count (which isn’t on the page anyways, because Notion) every few seconds to see where I’m at.

It’s so fucking hot outside, and it’s almost misleading. That’s the southern humidity at play, I think; anyone who says that you could “fry an egg on the sidewalk in this heat” seems to be talking exclusively about dry heat, but to me this heat is far more pernicious. I walked over to Church St Coffee this morning, and I walked back thinking it wasn’t terribly hot, but by the time I stepped into the front door, I could feel the world slipping away from me; I was getting dizzy and felt like I could pass out. It was that feeling after a really intense run where you just collapse on the ground in order to collect yourself.

I talked with Dan for a while about The Name of the Wind the other day, and he inspired me to start rereading it and really studying it. There’s a few things that came out of it, some expected but some very surprising. The expected thing is that Rothfuss’s writing style is indeed pretty particular, but I think there’s a definite technique to how he makes certain things “sound magical”: there’s a particular relationship between the words that he uses, and he often uses these extremely vague nouns and impresses his ideas onto them. For example, the classic opening prologue is all about silence, but he describes silence mostly using metaphors that aren’t really about silence, like describing it as “deep” and “heavy” like a river stone, or the iconic “cut-flower” sound of a man waiting to die. I suppose I’m just discovering metaphor, but I think the particular “distance” that his metaphors have is interesting, the way he mixes and matches “near” and “far” metaphors. That is to say, a silence being “heavy” is fairly common in English, e.g. a “weighty silence” or a “pregnant pause” feels like it holds potential, and is therefore heavy. However, things like “cut-flower” are totally different. Aside from being a really uncommon word (referring to a flower that has been cut to be used for decorative purposes), it’s also pretty much entirely related to silence, and even to “man” for that matter.

The other more noticeable thing as I read on was that, much to my surprise, long stretches of passages really aren’t that interesting. There’s long passages in there whose primary purpose is really not at all to be beautiful or poetic, but rather simply to convey information or set the scene. He intentionally starts out this story-about-stories with all the rumors and hearsay that will continue throughout the novel, but it’s largely just there to convey the basic information to the reader — information about tinkers and the town, about magic, and so on.

When I read all of this back out, it sounds inane or perhaps overly simple, but it’s nice for me to tease apart the different aspects. He introduces Kvothe, but he strictly introduces him in the context of others, letting him unfold. By starting off the story inside the tavern, he opens up a lot of different opportunities. First, characters don’t have to be particularly well-formed yet. He can bounce them off of one another in order to see exactly how they interact, and while he may know the gist of their personality, seeing them all in conversation helps all of that roll out. Bits of information slip out (like Kvothe, a.k.a. “Kote” early on, correcting the men about the tinker rhyme or knowing the name of the things that attacked Carter). Names, relationships, and town history are mentioned. He’s very particular about what he wants you to learn from this scene and makes sure to fit all of those bits in there.

My main struggle in writing historically seems to be that I’ve treated it monolithically, instead of as a mono-skill made up of many other, smaller skills. Developing characters, writing good sentences, designing a plot, worldbuilding, and so on. These are all great skills, and one really gets good at them when they work on them all together in a story, but they can also be honed and targeted in isolation.

So much conventional wisdom in writing seems to also treat it holistically, so I think I can be forgiven for that misunderstanding, but it’s also import that if I want to make steady progress, I need to learn the bits and pieces of the craft and carry them forward. There’s much studying to do, methinks, but all of this is kinda on the backburner for the moment. I have a billion things I’d like to learn, so this is going to have to sit somewhere on the list somewhere and right now it’s kinda below a lot of the language-learning stuff. I’d really love to be able to take and complete a JLPT N3 exam by the end of the year, so I’m really going to keep hustling on that for now. Writing will come. Besides, it’s really nice to get all of these thoughts down somewhere and just let them out of my brain. I can feel everything lightening up a little bit. That ring around my skull is tingling, which at least feels nice. I can see that I have about 90 seconds of more writing to do, but truthfully I’ve about said my piece on what I’ve learned so far, and starting another topic to write about would mean cutting it off somewhere in the middle. I’d probably have something to say about how learning the meaning of kanji is less about learning the kanji’s “names” and more about learning to actually see the kanji instead of looking at these huge blobs of strokes everywhere, and that that has something to do with ways of seeing and paying attention and so on, but that may to wait for another day.