In his fifteenth and sixteenth (and umpteenth) chapter, Robert Boice gifts us with advice on how to be moderate writers. When we write moderately, we can moderately create moderately good writing with moderate frequency on a moderate schedule. It is a very nice (but only moderately nice) approach to writing.
I’m more puzzled by these ideas than anything else in this book. If all it took to moderate one’s emotions was a decision to do so, would people really act the way they act? And, more importantly, would they ever be nearly as entertaining? I like writing that is ecstatic, or depressive, or painful, or, in other words, completely immoderate. I don’t care about the emotional toll it takes on the writer. And if that’s how I feel about the arrangement from the reader’s side, it doesn’t seem fair to endorse moderate feelings about writing.
The idea of moderate attachment is a bit more accessible. A writer must be willing to drown her children, so to speak—to let go of bits of writing in pursuit of a larger good. But isn’t this attachment to writing—or moderation—somehow immoderate in and of itself?
If my students pull all-nighters to finish their papers, I will revel in it. Look at my power to rob human beings of sleep! I am practically the boogey-man.
Isn’t Boice immoderately attached to mindfulness?
No comments:
Post a Comment