Episode 82 The hills are alive

Structured Visions

A question for the writers among us (writers of anything—novels, memoirs, short stories, theses, academic articles, monographs): What's your relationship with words?

Are you ringing in the New Year with a commitment to a daily, achievable word count target to ensure you achieve your writing goals by the end of 2023?

If so (and I hate to break this to you), you may be treating language like currency. And language will always resist that type of treatment. Despite your best intentions, one day soon the words may simply dry up, leaving you to face the blinking cursor of doom.

Rather than understanding language as divisible into quantifiable chunks (words), I think of language as fluid, a membrane in constant flux, forming and reforming around different imaginings of the self, the other, the world. When writers are in a flow state, I believe it's because they're allowing language to work its magic of shaping and reshaping selves.

Join me to discuss writer's block, life purpose and (why not?) The Sound of Music.

I mention two of my stories in this episode, 'The words of your language,' and 'Coming true', available on grammarfordreamers.com.

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