I write for mood. This was an epiphany I had this week. I started writing long before I started reading about writing. What I wrote reflected who I’d been reading—mostly Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury. Contemporary writing gurus indicated that we should cut to the chase. The modern attention span isn’t comfortable with the building of mood. They keep a finger on the mouse at all times, my friend, ready to click off your page if a yawn even starts. And this sickness has infected editors. We want the quick fix. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Literary foreplay is so twentieth century. And the millennia before that. The earliest recorded stories, like the Gilgamesh Epic, are repetitive and build to the action slowly. We don’t have time for that any more. Many hours of my childhood were whiled away behind a Ray Bradbury collection of stories. Some were little more than prose tone poems, but they were beautif...
Blog of a struggling writer.