Tag: meaning

Categories
Reflection Writing

Noise amongst the noise

Quoted The shapes of creative containers by marlee grace (Monday Monday)

the feeling of being noise amongst the noise

A fear for the modern world: to be noise when you want to be signal.

But you’ll always be noise to some. Better to focus on being signal for those open to receiving it.

—–

I disagree with her lament that writing essays is of lesser value than long form work. I think they can build the long work, breaking down thinking into facets to explore (assuming you’re writing non-fiction). A concept enough for a book is a lot to hold in your head at once: breaking it apart makes it more tangible and manageable. I found this to be true in fiction writing too: the container Word gave me for thinking about a story only let me handle about 50k words before I lost the thread, while with Scrivener I can manage stories of 130k+. Folders, outline views, and color coding make all the difference for me.

I do share her challenge of prioritizing long form over essays, I think, sometimes, to my detriment. I let myself trade my novel writing time for blogging time earlier this week, when I felt a welling up of ideas. It was a relief to unburden myself of buzzing ideas. To take the glimmering of potential and feel out its real shape and substance — because sometimes an idea is less than we imagine when put in writing, and sometimes it is so much more than we expected.

In a sense, translating thoughts into writing is our personal form of transmuting mental noise to signal. I think grace comes around to this too: “Sometimes I skip a Monday [newsletter] though and it’s like my whole week doesn’t make as much sense.”

Categories
Culture Meta Music

The sounds we like

Liked Lubricated social networks, great action movies that work without sound, and other pressing questions by Max Read (Read Max)

Reader Stephen writes:
“My conclusion is music made by 20-year-olds currently comes from a different cultural context I am no longer connected to, so it doesn’t resonate unless it sounds like something I already like (i.e. a garage rock band like Dehd). I can’t imagine getting into, like, hyperpop, but, again, I think it’s because it is responding to social and cultural phenomena I am simply not a part of.”

Max answers:

I think you have to think about it dialectically: it’s not just that cool young people who make cool unlistenable music are emerging out of a different context and responding to different cultural prompts than you (or me), it’s also that they are, to various levels of explicit intent, making music that you (and me) specifically will not like, so they will not be exposed to you (and me) and our fatally wack existences in their cool physical/ digital/ mind spaces. The hidden wholeness here is that by the fact of not “getting” the music we are participants in making it good and cool.

Haha, I appreciate when others share my weird fear of getting stuck listening to the same thing, this take is a kind thought 😂

I’m totally fine with aging (really life is getting better) and dgaf (probably actively avoid) what’s “cool.” What I do fear is becoming fixed and not giving new things a chance. (Frankly, this is not something I need to worry about 😉)

But maybe this is something to consider: when are you satisfied in your identity and preferences and can just settle deeper into them?

Is my love of newness culturally-acquired or personal? Does it disguise doubt or dissatisfaction with my tastes, an unknowing or resistance of the self? Is the quest for more music simply a reflection of our culture’s endless consumption, channeled to a medium I care about rather than material goods? Or is it a product of my changing in other ways: that my tastes are ever-shifting and need to be constantly re-found and re-formed through new sounds? Is it habitual or truly preferential? Does it not mean anything? Dunno but it’s interesting to consider, especially for a medium as visceral as music.

I have claimed exploration as part of my identity, but sometimes it’s tiring to always be taking in more information. I’m curious what it would look like to maintain a philosophy of openness without putting so much energy into seeking newness.

Categories
Writing

Meaning through truthfulness in language

Liked Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I Have Learned About Writing From Reading Thousands of Manuscripts by Jeannine Ouellette (Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette)

Our most important job as writers is—I believe—to make language capable of telling the truth. The essayist, activist, and poet Wendell Berry has written about this idea many times. In 2010, he addressed it in a letter to an English teacher and her class, writing: “By taking up the study of writing … you are assuming consciously … a responsibility for our language. What is that responsibility? I think it is to make words mean what they say. It is to keep our language capable of telling the truth. We live in a time when we are surrounded by language that is glib, thoughtless, pointless, or deliberately false.”

We must reject overly easy, overly familiar images and phrases and push ourselves instead for the slight adjustment that can make a world of difference.

This is what it means to defamiliarize language enough to let it hold truth. If the language is so familiar it washes over us, any truth it contains will be lost.

Categories
Writing

Imbue physicality with meaning in stories

Bookmarked against character vapor by Brandon (sweater weather)

A literalness of physical representation that does not deepen or sharpen the reality of either character or story. These sorts of descriptions feel quite rote, dull, dead. They feel like a transcription of a visual event totally deprived of poetry or sense. There is this sense that we are being cinematic when we watch a character cross a room. Rather than cinematic, I think we ought to be more dramatic.

In fiction, when you just plop those physical acts into your story or your novel, you’re copying the surface but not the deep reality.

We are brought along with the narrator’s perceptive field into the story. They are experiential, not narrated. They unfold in quasi real time, a sure indicator of experiential writing rather than the summarized narration. The psychic distance is quite close. We feel as things happen. And the things that do happen feel significant.

The author writes of literary works but I’m thinking of the physicality of romance: that a good sex scene is not “insert tab a into slot b” but full of what action means to the characters. That action conveys conflict and cooperation, is a proxy for the state of their relationship. That the other’s actions push them to a response: do they let the other lead or fight for control, do they trust the other with their vulnerability, do they deny the act has meaning between them? How does coming together change them both?

Via.

Categories
Websites

Include emotion in alt text for improved understanding

Bookmarked Writing great alt text: Emotion matters by Jake Archibald (jakearchibald.com)

The relevant parts of an image aren’t limited to the cold hard facts. Images can make you feel a particular way, and that’s something that should be made available to a screen reader user.

A good reminder to not get hung up on the details but focus on the meaning.

Categories
Mental Health Personal Growth

Apply Meaning with Intention

Quoted 3-2-1: On mediocrity vs. genius, taking risks, and when to ignore a problem | James Clear by James Clear (James Clear)

3 short ideas from James Clear, 2 quotes from other people, and 1 question for you.

“The events of your past are fixed. The meaning of your past is not.

The influence of every experience in your life is determined by the meaning you assign to it.

Assign a more useful meaning to your past and it becomes easier to take a more useful action in the present.”

— James Clear

This is a good reminder for a ruminator like me.

You are in control of interpreting your past. Apply meaning with intention to not be trapped by past mistakes.