alan benefit again :)

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Wed, 2006-09-06 21:32

http://www.abctales.com/story/alan_benefit/7-end-of-a-new-beginning

hard to pull off, stories about writers, so many have been done before, but this has a fresh voice and dark humour without sounding smug. This paragraph works for its honesty, almost as if the author has broken through.

You sweat your nuts off with this stuff¦ night and morning and afternoon and night, day after day, month after month, hitting those keys, spinning the ideas, conceiving the characters, carrying their weight around, birthing them, kissing life into them, feeding them, clothing them, sending them out into the world, finding them lives to live, giving them purpose, giving them futures, making it interesting, making it plausible, making it gel, making it funny and sad and true and good and as best as it can be and the best you can get it and the best thing you've ever done and the greatest thing ever¦ only for some over-paid Philistine git in an office to eat his ten quid smelly-deli sandwiches over it and dismiss it in words of one syllable?

but i love the way he bounces back, don't we all.

Juliet

Thu, 2006-09-07 08:46

skinsen

I whole heartedly concur - hoorah for Mr benefit.

Thu, 2006-09-07 09:21

mississippi

Sorry to disagree, but that paragraph goes on far too long. It reads like a shopping list. Whatever happened to less is more?

Thu, 2006-09-07 12:40

alan_benefit

Thank you, folks - including Mississippi (well, he would say that, wouldn't he) Glad to hear it's a common experience. Maybe it does go on and on and on, like Old Glory herself (should that be himself?), but I'm happy with it. For me, it expresses how I felt at the time something similar happened. Maybe it happened 'cos I had just far too many long paragraphs...

Thu, 2006-09-07 17:15

skinsen

Maybe if read in contextto the whole story it may not seem so long. It is a rant and eludes to the manic nature of a frustrated writer faced with the indiscriminate power of publishers and their underlings. I felt it, so it must be there in the writing. Down with indiscriminate power crazed publishers and their underlings!

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