Technology As List-Making, Time-Wasting, Updating Mechanism

I joined Twitter today.

So, many a person has been given the ability to socialize via the communication tools over the worldwide web. So, how effective are these tools as they relate to productivity or education or communication? I’m not sure. After all, a brand new twitter’er myself, I am curious as to the plight of my online experience when I follow Barack Obama’s updates on policy (presumably not written by him and I expect nothing less), Ashton Kutcher’s silly anecdotal comments about celebrity gossip and paparazzi, and hoping to soon find novelists, screenwriters, and directors. The latter I can hopefully access some of their thought processes. Wouldn’t this be somewhat productive as far as learning perspective in the world? A world I’d like to think I share quite well with other writers? So, Twitter has promoted a lot of “Tech gossip”, which is probably prompted by Twitter itself, as people write tweets, or rather small one-liners 160 characters or less, about their lives. Mundane, exciting, whatever their lives consist of, we get to hear about it. So, why would a person tweet to begin with? Again, I’m not sure. After all, Facebook allows everyone to update their profile status with supposedly interesting tidbits. Twitter has a smiliar concept, not that I’m aware which one started the commotion. I’m fascinated by all these social networking tools, and their affects on business, technology, and life. Naturally, I’m going to begin by following other twitter’ers to get the gist of these one-line tweets, but what’s to stop me from being satiric in each tweet given? Nothing, right? But, then again, perhaps that’s the fun of it? But if it is just fun, certainly I can find other things to occupy my time with. I’d rather consider myself one of words, of charm and prolific statements. However, if there is some way to brush ideas and wit against the cyberspace community and learn from it, maybe it is worth it. I’m giving it a test run. I’ve seen what Shakespeare might say from another satiric list-maker (I fear Twitter is in some ways a list-displayer, which would make me a list-maker) and found it funny. If I could write something to this effect, I would find it amusing. And perhaps allow me material for the real thing. http://www.abdpbt.com/2008/12/08/10-tweets-you-might-see-if-shakespeare-used-twitter/
After all, most of you know, this blog will transform some of its content as seedlings for my stream-of-consciousness novel. I look at life as material for this. Perhaps Twitter is just that.

The Standards of A Writer

Writers are often misunderstood creatures. We tend to be a bit introverted, introspective, and self-reflective, yet balance these qualities with a so-called normal life, yet always observant, always wondering how to tell a story, make it valuable, make it real. A favorite film character of mine is a novelist, and he said in response to whether his novel was autobiographical:

Well, I mean, is anything autobiographical? We all see the world through our own tiny keyhole, right? I mean, I always think of Thomas Wolfe... he says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own mind, that you can't avoid that. 1

Well, there you go. In fact, it seems his novel was autobiographical, in some sense, by his standards. I was reading this review of the "writing life" by Oscar Villalon, which showed how one man interviewed all these different writers and published in The Paris Review, a well-know academic journal. The later book was then called The Paris Review Interviews. Article here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99920411&ft=1&f=1032

In reading an excerpt from this, it really made me think about what it is to be a writer, taking from the “clay of [one’s] own mind” and making it valuable. When I go for a run down the beach, I find myself formulating stories about the people I pass on the boardwalk, biking, tanning, playing volleyball, reading, arguing with each other. Each of these persons has a story to tell. So do I. Listening to the waves crash, it makes me feel alive, well, and as if that piece of nature is a part of me. But, as a writer, it does seem strange to imagine not looking at the world that way. Just to enjoy the moment. I sometimes feel like I’m living in the world and looking at it from the outside from some vantage point only I can see from. From my tiny keyhole, I guess. I mean, in looking at the lives of Silvia Plath, Raymond Carver, Franz Kafka, Joyce Carol Oates, James Joyce, Brett Easton Ellis, I think about just how each of these men and women lived. Raymond Carver mentions in his interview that he probably drank more than most people did, and that he found that to be a hazard in the profession he’d chosen. Now, I may not have statistics on it, but it got me thinking. Not that all writers are drunks. More that we choose to experience or have a passion for experiences that will give us more stories, more tales. Writers have that zeal or fire to capture life and then show it on the page. Just like artists do, I guess. I’m not a talented painter, but I do paint. Just another way to express myself. Use a piece of that discontented creativity to express something. My small little piece of how the world looks, or how people seem to speak, what I say in other people’s relationships… Just to find out what’s valuable and again to show that value and meaning through the expression in ink.

1 "Before Sunset Script" - transcript from the screenplay, http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/b/before-sunset-script-transcript.html