This week: On the Surface Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
—Ernest Hemingway
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
—Ray Bradbury
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
—Anais Nin |
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Writing has been around for at least 3500 years.
That's a long time. Far longer than the axled wheel, but not as long as beer, which probably says something about our priorities.
The earliest known writing came from the same culture that invented beer: Sumer. (They didn't invent the axled wheel, though.) But what we know about written works from that long ago is necessarily biased in favor of media that can last, well, thousands of years: stone and clay. It's entirely possible, even likely, that writing developed earlier, and the true innovation of 3500 years ago was figuring out a way to make the writing survive the ravages of time.
When you take a moment to think about it, writing—and even the proto-writing such as the figures and symbols we've found painted on cave walls, some of which are as much as 10 times older than the Sumerian clay tablets—is a kind of magic.
You have a thought, so you express it. Before writing, that expression was spoken. It may impress itself upon the listener(s), but the original speech is lost in the void, forever. Writing changed all that. You make marks with some implement on some surface, and others who know the markings can know what it is you wanted to express, even over a stretch of space or time.
We take it for granted most of the time now, and we have other ways—recordings or video—to communicate, but the magic of writing endures... even if we're moving back toward proto-writing pictographs in the form of emoji.
One of the earliest known stories, the Epic of Gilgamesh (also Sumerian), deals, in part, with the titular hero/king questing for immortality. In this, he was denied.
Or was he? |
Some fantasy writing for your reading pleasure:
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Last time, in "Drawing on Reality" , I discussed the core of reality in Fantasy.
The harsh reality is that no one had any comments.
So that's all for me for October! See you next month. Until then,
DREAM ON!!!
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Fantasy: October 18, 2023 Issue [#12227]
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