30th
Three writing-related blog posts I started but didn't finish
I’ve started three blog posts in the last 20 minutes, but didn’t finish any of them.
Here’s a summary:
Verbs are your friends: This would have encouraged you to pep up your writing with vivid, surprising verbs. You’d have learned some of my least favourite verbs (leverage, utililize). And I’d have suggested you look at your own writing and try to replace dull verbs with active, vivid ones. Turn “remove” to “prune”, “move” to “hurtle”, “drink” to “swill” and so on.
I would have especially talked about (or “obsessed about”) avoiding adverb + verb combinations when a single power-verb would be better.
Cheap tricks for bringing dead sentences to life: This would have encouraged you to alliterate (starting lots of words with the same sound), emphasize concrete images (‘bring dead writing to life’ is more concrete than ‘make them livelier’ — you’ll think of Frankenstein, resurrection, zombies, or all three), use strong verbs (see above), and be a bit naughty (cheap tricks — you shouldn’t use them, but so much more fun than advice).
How the codex replaced the scroll — and what this means for the Kindle: the codex was invented about 2000 years ago. Nowadays, we call them books. A book was portable, could carry as much information as several scrolls, was easier to reproduce and pass around.
And they were easily searchable — you could flick through them and find any piece of text in a matter of seconds. Try doing that with a 2-foot long scroll!
But for hundreds of years codices / books struggled to gain acceptance. Christians were codex innovators — one of the first religions to use them to store sacred texts — and this is part of the reason the gospels spread so widely and so fast. All this is kind of relevant to whether ebooks will replace books, and how long it will take — but I didn’t get that far.
Maybe these posts will grow next week.
Until then, have a great weekend.