April 28, 2008
< previous day | archives | next day >
Google Maps error causes me a bit of consternation
I arrived in Liberal, Kansas after dark, Googled the location of Wal-Mart where I hoped to spend the night, drove there - and found no Wal-Mart. It took a few minutes, but I found it lurking a few blocks over. I only recently started using Google Maps to locate businesses and now wonder how often this kind of thing happens.
Night camp:
Wal-Mart parking lot, Liberal, Kansas
Writing From the Inside Out
A young writer, if he is unknown, can be at a party and watch what everyone is doing. If he has a marveluos ear for dialog, he can wake up the next morning and remember all that was said and how it was said. He is a bird on a branch. Sees like a bird and writes books that are extraordinarily well observed. But once he is successful, especially if that happens quickly, it's as if the bird were now an emu. It cannot fly. It grows haunches and foreshoulders and a mane: lo and behold, it is a lion. And everyone is looking at the lion, including the birds. But it is a lion with the heart of a bird and the mind of a bird. So there is a terrible period when the transmogrified emu is trying to live like a lion and has little talent for it. Then the beast begins to experiment. When it runs, it now sees other animals scamper. It takes a while - often years - for the writer to get to appreaciate his effect on others, and even longer to begin to understand human beings again. In the old days, he could write about friends, enemies, and strangers by intuition, by induction; now he puts it together by deduction. Of course, he does have more material on which to work his deductions.