Good writing is like good music. Both stay with you long after the experience is over, moving from your brain to your guts to your life. They each are a kind of communication from one human to another, a shared experience between the writer or composer and the reader or listener. Where reading lacks a performer bringing life to black notes on paper is a kind of advice for writers that are careful enough to understand it.
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The musings of someone who picked it up on the streets.
Difficult Stuff
The movie is set in a distant time and place where just about anything can happen. The potential for amazing special effects is built into the scenario, which is always good. It gets difficult when the characters have to explain what’s about to happen in a way that is believable. Usually, it’s done with a simple analogy that the audience can relate to. “It’s like a rubber band that if you stretch it too far it’ll break!” Take the same need to explain and put it into the real world, however, and it gets even harder. Accuracy is critical, if nothing else, because a bad analogy is worse than no analogy.
Pronouns
The reader can make of it what they want. This may seem like a perfectly reasonable sentence in English to most people, but it has a serious problem. If the word “readers” is plural the problem goes away, but it’s singular for a reason. The subject is the reader, who is referred to later as “they”. In this case, “they” is not a plural pronoun, but a singular one meaning “he or she”. It’s a common usage, but it’s wrong. So what is the problem?
A Short Fable
Sometimes, a fable can sneak into our heads in a way that cold, hard reality doesnt. That’s why I like writing stories like this.
Jeremy was not a bad squirrel, at least not in the sense that he deliberately tried to harm anyone. But he was selfish, looking out for himself whenever he had the chance. He lived in a nest made of oak leaves high above the place called Five Oaks, where the ancient oak trees grow so tightly together that a cool darkness sat on the forest floor all day.
Punful
There’s never a bad time to inflict pun on people. All language is a kind of play on words, the meanings taken from the stage they are set on. Tying it all to some greater sense of the worldly is a gag about what happens when we’re not gagged, or how we express rather than exasperate. The problem is that most people take their lives so serially that they don’t get it. A good punster has to risk looking more and more the moron. If the joke’s on the language, the language is all a joke, it seems, and that can cause a lot of being cross to bear.
Bear with me on this, will you?
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 