I am on an old-fashioned email list elsewhere, and there is discussion about moving the group to Discord. Knowing nothing about Discord, I read an article and was immediately horrified. It was described as having all your friends always around you. Yeeg. I really like the measured quality of a list. It doesn’t demand immediate attention. You don’t have to worry about losing track.
This led me to think about being a writer. I like written words. I like having time to think about them and revise them. If you write, you are likely to be passionate about communication — but not face-to-face communication. A fiction writer speaks through the masks of characters to an audience that is not present. There are a lot of removes here. Obviously, some writers enjoy face-to-face communication and are good at it. I’m not bad. I like doing panels and can enjoy talking to people at cons. But it’s a different experience from sitting alone, preferably in a coffee shop, and writing and rewriting till the scene works.
I miss sitting in coffee shops…
There is, I suppose, a control issue in writing fiction. There is certainly a craft issue. You don’t have this control or craft in the real world. There’s a T.S. Eliot line that is floating just outside my conscious mind. I tracked it down. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. “This is not what I meant at all. That’s not it, at all.” — In fiction and poetry, you can get the lines right.