Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
This is the Doctrine’s contribution to ‘the Unicorn Challenge‘
A photo-prompt bloghop hosted by jenne and ceayr, it has the simplest of rules: keep it at (or under) 250 words.
This weeks ‘phoTAT’:
“…Il meglio
“…è l’inimico del bene”
“!?…Il meglio…”…Il meglio…meglio! meglio? meglio!!! “
“Il meglio è l’inimico del bene…
“…bene, bene.”
“Surely the doctors have a way to help, to stop, to even slow his decline?”
“No, nothing they’ve tried since his wife signed the committal papers. I can only imagine how hard it must have been on her, to watch his decline into madness, typing his fingers bloody sitting at an old computer, long after they unplugged it from the internet.”
“Surely treatments are available, it’s the twentieth-first century, for God’s sake!”
“Nothing has worked, the full spectrum of medication… nothing. Now he spends every waking hour here in the Day Room. The orderlies collect packets of sugar each morning. We let them believe we don’t know. They’ve formed a bond with him, little comfort to his family, though…”
“He had such promise. That blog of his, at least in the beginning when it was just about personality types, brilliant. Then he got infected. Fictionaria writomania, I believe is what the admitting form lists as proximate cause.”
“…don’t go there.”
“But I could have stopped it, saved him even. But no, I had to say, ‘Your detective story has promise…’ damn that whole beta Reader conceit.”
About clarkscottroger
Ha! Molto ironico, mio amico scrittore. Mi hai fatto lol!
Laughing. No pressure on your Beta readers, hmm?
I suspect we all suffer from varying degrees of ‘Fictionaria writomania’.
lol
thanks this blogosphere in such a cool place
Big grin here I wonder how many with pen and ink suffered from the same.
I suspect most of us can identify with this ‘the blogger’s burden’
Ah, poor fellow. What a dreadful fate. He got a glimpse of the possible and that was that. I like the repeated mantra at the start – so true – and the poor devil with his bloodied fingers hammering away endlessly. Oh. I’m almost overcome with horror at where it might all end for him. I’ll warn my Beta reader never, ever to encourage me, and maybe we should stop being so nice and uplifting to each other here on the Unicorn. Look where it leads!
lol
In the category of ‘no good comment goes unpunished’ here’s a question.
(If you did not take up writing at an earlier stage in life) Do you think you could’ve at a much earlier stage of life?
When I first got here (online) I used to joke about wishing I took a typing class in high school, not to mention pay more attention during English.)
I’m pretty sure, if it occurred to me to try, back in those high school/college years, writing would not have resonated (with some part of me) as it does now.
What an interesting question. I’ve been thinking back to my younger years and wondering how to answer. I played around with writing little things as a child, I recall, but what got me thinking about it as an adult wasn’t until my late 30s, when my father died unexpectedly. I joined an evening class in creative writing and wrote a piece about him. After that I kept going, but not sharing anything, and sliding for some reason into poetry (horrible stuff, most of it 🙂). It took me a long time to feel confident enough to show my work to anyone, and, to get to the point of your question, no, I don’t think I could have produced anything worthwhile as a young adult. I don’t think I produced much of worth in my first ten or so years of trying to write as it was. Maybe that was because I was thinking mostly of poetry back then.
I’m always envious of writers who get going young, focused, and driven in some cases. They’re getting so much experience under their belt, and have more years ahead to find their voices, confidence, and communities of support.
Thanks for asking, Clark. It’s been good to be prompted to think about your question. A little bit of self-analysis is always helpful, I think.
Being relatively new to the writing space, I’ve yet to tire of hearing how others experience this… activity.
The Wakefield Doctrine is the reason for me to get here, (long story), but once I started the blog the first virtual space I spent time in was Facebook. (Around 2009… was different, like everything, I guess) where I met most of the virtual friends I still have.
I could go on at length about how the Doctrine allowed me to participate in the virtual world, which I discovered, almost right, away was totally the Land of Letters. But despite my goal being to expose as many people as possible to the principles of the Wakefield Doctrine) I never thought of blogpost writing as being… writing-writing.
I quickly noted how skilled were my (new) friends at expressing theyselfs* in this medium?genre?format? And as a reaction, (quite not-characteristically), rather than run away, I just upped my rate of practice. My view then, (as it remains), was that as long as I was permitted to associate with others who were way better at this writing thing, then as long as I didn’t get myself kicked out, my own efforts would improve.
lol Funny thing, I made a couple of early attempts to write ‘a novel’. Because, of course that would be the best and most realistic approach to improving my skills. When I look back at what I wrote (if I had a need for subject matter, which thank god I do not) there’s a couple of cool short stories buried in the past posts.
If I don’t get asked to leave ‘the Unicorn Challenge’ or ‘the Six Sentence Story’ I just keep looking for stories to type.
Now, if I can only master… what’s the technical term for it… oh yeah, ‘Grammar and Punctuation’
* one of the primary ways I manifested my clarklike nature was in my enthusiastic embracing of neologism (’cause, you know, the best defense is a good offense?)