What does it mean to think something through? If I have a list of expenses I need to total for the month, thinking about that problem means gathering the relevant data and adding each accurately to the next. This kind of thinking we call calculating or computing, finding the always and necessary connection of facts, …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Piety and Care
Thomas Mann’s bizarre but mythic short story The Transposed Heads retells an Indian legend treating the intricately riddling questions of identity: who am I, who are you, who are we together? A young couple and a friend are on their way home (in more ways than one), and passing a temple in the countryside, one …
Say What You See
It can help us in our writing if we remember just how crazy a thing it is we’re trying to do. Imagine putting a word to every last thing we perceive, and then putting all those perceptions together into a self-reflecting kaleidoscope for someone else to look through. We witnessed something, and now it’s in …
Lovely Illogic
Here is the first of Writing Smartly’s new Thursday posts, very short selections from significant writers and thinkers to help keep keen perceptions and masterful language before us. *** This most beautiful passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams” defeats logic at its own game, for the noun surfeit means not only excess, …
Studying Studiously
The root of our word studious means zealous. To study something originally means to attend to it seriously, earnestly, devotedly in the belief that what we are trying to understand can open a vision otherwise closed off to us by a merely casual acquaintance with the subject. In its original connotation, whatever we study will …