Meta-Observations Wednesday, August 13, 2003

One thing I'm noticing about the entries here is that they're a mix of ordinary speaking voice and a highfalutin writerly style. Part of this reading Waugh, trying to ape the 800-pound gorilla. More than that, though, I think I'm trying to suss out what I want my writing to sound like these days. There's vernacular first-person stuff, which is how my sci-fi stories usually end up; slightly elevated first-person stuff for fantasy stories; and a weak mixture of the two for journalism and blogging. I think I'm at my best in e-mail: It's mostly my own voice but with these flourishes of high style that seem "in character."

Partly it's the audience, I guess. If you know me, and you come across a construction like "dissipated extrovert" in an e-mail, you can probably imagine how I'd actually say it: pronouncing it carefully--so I get points for coming up with it--but in an outerborough accent, so you know that I'm not taking myself seriously. In "public" writing, nobody knows you, nobody brings those assumptions to the table.

How to resolve this? You can't write jargon books forever (unless somebody decides to take Secret Thing Ur-1, copyright 2000, public, in which case I'll write them till my fingers fall off). And I'm not going to wake up and turn into Mervyn Peake.

Maybe I just need a good narrator. I think I have one in mind. More later.

Au revoir. See ya!

@ 3:49:00 PM,

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