what does it even mean to be a writer? it means: good stories, well written > "*Invent nothing, deny nothing.* That is the meaning of character" mamet said. > "Strip it" klepack said. they were talking about acting, of course. everything interesting i've ever worked on or learned about has had a tendril in the writing. learning about writing directly? maybe not so much. grammar and syntax were honed by necessity, assignments growing spontaneously out of a need to make the page right, like the kid building his own motorcycle learning about trigonometry because it makes the bike run better. mamet: > "To serve in the real theatre, one needs to be able to please the audience and the audience only." The wonderful thing about all this is, when I really look clearly, I have to realize that I really don't know how to write. What better moment than now, therefore, to start learning? which of these seems more true: - a good story has to be told - to be good, a story has to be told I used to think "I need an audience" was a shameful admission. Now I know it is a brave declaration. > "There is no character. There are just lines on the page." The so-called "organism" that I've pretended to be trying to create all these years is a deliberately un-creatable abstraction, whose "words on the page" slip conveniently out of the way any time I might be close to realizing that I am hiding from telling a story. Didn't I realize this a different way last year? That the organism already exists. I don't need to "create" it, jesus, wtf do I think I am. I just need to convey it to an audience. The most redemptive quality of the teh-dsa is that it doesn't exist. Hey, I guess teh-dsa is kinda like "god" then, hey? (Parasitic Revolution, my favorite band, doesn't exist either. But that didn't stop them from becoming famous.) teh-dsa is a soggy pigeon, a chuckling trout, a game, a syndrome, a box of snapshots, any manifestation of a lifetime spent giving in to the joy of pretending teh-dsa is real. teh-dsa is everything that is not said because it is not needed to be said. > "We do not embellish those things we care deeply about." (2015)