On Writing and Synchronicity
As any word nerd will tell you, the discussion of the written word with someone who relishes the beauty and complexity of it as much as you do is nothing short of pure joy. (Yes. I know that oftentimes this blog contains neither beauty nor complexity.) There are several people with whom I discuss writing. We talk about our frustration at the bad and our exhuberance at the good.
A couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with one of those people. She's a friend, who used to be my editor and taught me more about writing in 5 years than I learned in all my years of school. One of the things we discussed was how refreshing it was to read that J.K. Rowling is sad to see the Harry Potter series coming to an end. It means she still cares about it. We're not sure if the same can be said about (just one example) James Patterson and his Alex Cross series. Does he still really care about Alex and his family, or is he just cranking out books for the money now? I promised myself that when I stop caring about Joe and Gina, the main characters in my series, I'll stop writing books about them.
Then there's The Best Friend. This is where the synchronicity comes in. One of the things we do for fun is critique newspapers from all over the country. (Gotta love the Internet. Again, only word nerds will totally understand this.) When he was away on business and we couldn't e-mail everyday, I happened to come across one of the worst metaphors of all time. Of course I haven't seen every metaphor ever written but, I'm tellin' ya, this one was bad. (I won't post it here because someone could Google it and find out who wrote it. Despite how bad it was, I don't want to embarrass a fellow writer. But if you care enough, e-mail me and I'll tell you what it was.) I was frustrated that I couldn't share the metaphor with The Best Friend. But, it was stuck in my head the whole time he was gone (That's how bad it was!) so I told him about it. He had, almost verbatim, the same reaction I had. Even when The Best Friend isn't away on business, he's not allowed to look at his personal e-mail at work so, on the days he calls me on his way home from work he hasn't yet seen my reply to his daily morning e-mail. Yesterday, in my reply, I was telling him about a newspaper article that just didn't cut it for me. Without going into my usual rampage about the seemingly lost art of the inverted pyramid style of news reporting, I said "If I read the first two paragraphs and don't know what the story is about or why I should care, I don't finish reading." When he called yesterday, before reading what I had written, he said "It was refreshing to read that article in The New York Times. I read the first two paragraphs and knew exactly what they were trying to say." See? We're so in synch. That's very, very cool. It's probably also one of the reasons I miss him so much when he's away on business.
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