September 8, 2009 - Breakfast
I'm doing two readings this month, so last night I read through this blog, not quite in its entirety, to see if I could extract a ten-minute piece from it. I can, it turns out--and it will be fun and, hopefully, traumatic for all involved if I stand heavily before an audience and read from my snax diary--but dear God, bits are hacky.
The two things that annoy me the most are: (1) a false sense of expertise that pervades the prose; I keep coming to this subject with authority ("The Bear Who Let It Alone"), while I lack all authority; and (2) a tendency to go on a little, or a lot, too long.
Of course, this process is boring--this is why our culture invented the montage, so as to skip over the chores of weight loss, athletic training, and academic development in order to move the plot forward.
I admit a certain guilt that I can't move the plot forward with more speed than a quarter-pound a day. It feels that if I'm writing daily I should be able to do just that.
CUT TO:
PROTAG refusing a sandwich.
CUT TO:
PROTAG jogging in the morning, then doing situps.
CUT TO:
PROTAG in the boxing gym, hitting the heavy bag.
CUT TO:
PROTAG getting into bed, exhausted, too tired to take off his headband.
CUT TO:
Music fades. PROTAG get out of bed, a willow.
I don't feel upset that it doesn't work that way, that it's a scene-by-scene Warholesque slog. I do feel a bit guilty. It seems unfair to the reader to subject them to what normally takes the length of a single Motown song.
As raw material it's not so bad. I've got a ten-minute story out of the past two months--that's good enough. And I like the way the tables work, and the dotted lines.
| Food | Qty | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| Cereal, Kashi, 1 c. | 1.5 | 180 |
| Cereal, fibrous, 2/3 cup | 1.5 | 120 |
| Milk, no fat, 1 c. | 90 | |
| Total | 390 |
Weight: 327 lbs