I'd like to write more about the craft of writing itself, but other than reviewing books on writing or picking apart my own material, proper angles have been nonobvious. I did receive a lot of e-mails, however, on my diffing of Roger Ebert's style in his original review of La Dolce Vita against his current one, and I sense more opportunity down that vein.
A series of posts on improving individual pieces of writing could, I imagine, be both interesting and useful to anyone who happens by. Given that such an effort would work best with actual, real-life writing not authored or filtered by me, I put the call out to you, dear readers: please to be sending me any 100-700ish-word examples of writing that you think aren't perfect but aren't hopeless either — "problematic," say — and I will write posts attempting to rebuild it. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster. I have the technology.
These pieces of writing can be anything: reviews, blog posts, commentaries, ruminations, explanations, excerpts, stories, musings, tracts. Ideally, they'll have a solid core of ideas but express them less effectively than they could have. I will wield my suite of aesthetic Ginsu knives, possibly successfully, possibly failure-ly, but I think we'll all learn something in the end. When you've got 'em, you should send 'em (or links to 'em) either to colinjmarshall at gmail or post them in a comment here.
(Update: I don't mean send in writing of your own. You can, but my idea was more to get stuff you've run across.)
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Posted by: muskelaufbau | October 03, 2009 at 02:04 AM