Sell Out in a Different Way

In Moveable, which is the last book I read, and yes I read it more than a month ago, Hemingway gets angry at Fitzgerald for prostituting his writing out to the booksellers to finance his lifestyle and otherwise get by.

Not that I'm either of them but I do wonder about how writing within certain constraints limits the imagination. I write a fair amount every day, probably between 1500 and 2000 words, maybe more, but mainly I put a lot of sentences together that say, "'The subject did the verb,' he said." I'm certainly very confident in my ability to write that kind of sentence, more so than I was when I started this job, but how valuable is that?

More worrisome, perhaps: There are a lot of writing conventions at this place that I disagree with. I don't like phrases that start with "amid" or clauses that start with "as." I've managed to steer clear of the former, but the latter has been fairly unavoidable. In journalism, you don't want to say something is caused by something even if you believe it to be true, because that ruins objectivity and accuracy. So people pretend like they're not drawing a causal line (even though they are) with these words.

There are other examples. Gerunds get a bit too much play, although not for any particular reason. And people get hooked on stringing sub clauses and modifiers one after the other in stream-of-consciousness fashion. I can't tell if hating those moves is just a personal stylistic quirk of mine, but it concerns me a bit that I might be on the many-gerund path.

Overall, though, can't complain about getting $$ for having my fingers on the home row. I just got a little nervous when my grandmother asked me the other week whether I was still writing for myself, sending fiction off for publication. I told her no, that my priorities had realigned, and that I liked the writing I was getting paid for. It occurs to me now that liking it and being proud of it are two separate ideas.

But that's what blogging's for, I guess.

Straight to video, as Sulks would say.