Writing

1. Sorry for not posting in, um, some long-ish amount of time. Almost two weeks? I usually start thinking, "Oh, I'll wait until a few interesting things happen and then I'll write about them all at once!" but then SO MANY THINGS happen and it's just too much and I just don't write about them at all.

2. I just finished reading Robinson Crusoe for 18th Century Writing. For a while, I enjoyed it. Then it just got so unbearably repetitive. I was reading it Sunday night and was literally nodding off. Which was partly because of all my London shenanigans, but I'd say a good 56% was because I was reading the same thing over and over again. And not like when you are tired and end up reading the same sentence or paragraph multiple times. Like when the author actually writes basically the exact same thing multiple times in a row. Which is just unnecessary, I think.

3. Which made me start thinking about writing in general, and why we have to read certain texts for class, and what is considered good (or great) literature and what's not, and why a novel like Robinson Crusoe is so respected in the literary sphere. Because honestly, and I may be missing something, I'm not that impressed with Robinson Crusoe. Now, I definitely believe there should be standards for literature, and I do think Robinson Crusoe falls within those standards, but. It made me think about standards, and then specifically within a university setting, on what grounds can anyone determine the quality of a creative writing piece.

4. Because I am writing a play for my Creative Writing Dissertation. And I met with my adviser the other week, and she told me I needed to work on my dialogue because it didn't sound quite natural, the way "real people" would speak. Well. I know that. I know I have a tendency to write with more heightened dialogue. But...don't most playwrights? Also, the dialogue I have so far was written very intentionally for the way it sounds, as well as what is being said. Plus she's not satisfied with my stage directions, which are minimal and allow room for interpretation (I like interpretation. I like giving people options.), which is fine, I'll fix that and write a ton of really detailed stage direction and it will help contribute to the 50 pages I need to complete by the end of the term. But I feel very much like I'm writing creatively with someone else's limitations and expectations, and I don't like it.

5. Also, I wrote a bunch of postcards and left just enough space on all of them for a normal sized 87p stamp. But apparently the post office ran out of those and won't have any until after Christmas (it takes over two months to get more stamps? what country am I in??) so I had to put half of the postcards in envelopes just to accommodate the ridiculously large stamps. Which defeats the purpose of a postcard as being something that doesn't require an envelope. OH WELL.