on structures of words
I’ve always been a reader, a devourer of words. Recently, I’ve felt a bit out of sorts, and I’ve come to realize that this is because I haven’t been keeping up with my reading. So this weekend, I spent some time with the words and I feel more settled for it.
But I’ve also recently been spending time stringing words together. The Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference 2023 ended last weekend, and that was an awesome week of hanging out with other writers of words.
For roughly five and a half years, I’ve been writing a haiku each day. I can’t remember why I started this particular exercise, but it’s been an interesting journey. Writing within such a tight structure – three lines, of five and seven and five syllables – is a fascinating challenge. Some days, the words come easily and some days, it requires effort to find suitable words to make up the count.
Some days, the haiku makes no sense but other days, I feel like the unknown craftsman of Yanagi Soetsu, fashioning and fashioning and on rare occasion, producing something of great beauty.
Even writing a mathematical paper puts my words (and formulae) into a particular structure, since there is a standardness to many papers. Or at least, to many of my papers.
A blank page, an idea before the words have gone down on paper, can be an intimidating sight, and so having a structure within which to work can be a useful thing, at least for me. But then, as with all of these, I’m just writing out of my own experience.
Even a blog post such as this, to get a bit recursive, is an engaging experience at the best of times. Blog posts tend to be relatively short, focusing on a single topic, raising many possible roads for exploration but alas, not having the time to walk them.
multijimbo 