THE FUN IN FALSE STARTS: WRITING IS ALIVE WITH EACH STEP
by Bruce Piasecki, author of Doing More with Less
The mistress muse of creativity suggests that writing is a journey, where you can go back over when you started. You must be faithful to her, or else! Go back, young writers, until the start sings.
This explains why readers believe in a laugh, and a false start. Just like surprise in the first ten minutes at the movies, or in a wonderful set of tales told by early lovers. Read the passages when Shakespeare introduces us to a new couple in love; it is replete with wondrous false starts. Watch how Joyce or Whitman or even a prose gifted writer like George Orwell starts each piece.
Good readers, looking for more fun and more fundamental things than pure information, are willing to have their sensibilities suspended with hints of indirection. For them, a false start, if recognized, is a gentle reminder that the entire portrayal has wit, and warmth, and good humor behind it — rather than grand ma’s dull and drawn window-shades.
Solid writing informs, persuades, and delights. And part of the delight can be in a false start. A false start can be the first window inside the grand mansion.
Take this case in point.
Ease Joint Pain From the Ground Up
Your feet take a beating every day of your life, from youthful basketball K-mart sneakers to the wing tip days on the professional urban beat of high-rises and endless curbs.
With each step you take, the bones and soft tissues in your feet provide support and mobility for your entire body — like each paragraph in a finely tuned tale. This means that your gait — parallel to a readers’ pace of taking in the tale — takes with each step the full weight of your stride, the full force of your being. Their is a simultaneity the writer must measure as they anticipate reader response. You can tell from the start good writing. It is like a good conversation between writer and reader, as the reader can always go back to watch your tricks, and delight.
The daily stress that accompanies each step not only is applied to each foot you keep, but is also applied to the delicate strength in your ankles, and in the tight widgets of your toes. As you walk along, your understand that your legs to your knees, your hips to your lower back, are all at risk. Here think about how Edgar Allen Poe brings you into any of his tales, or how a great speaker like Winston Churchill and President Obama awarded us with deliberate humor and at times, clever, false starts.
So, it is understandable how your choice of a good book, and the way it treats your understanding, add to or limit the joy of your reading, the delight in it.
Wait. Hahaha! I was supposed to say: “So, it is understandable how your choice of a good shoe, and the way it shapes your foot, matters.”
Ha-ha.
I hope you enjoyed that false start, for their is a lesson in it deeper parallelism than you can get from the local Doc on the degenerative nature of hallux rigidus. Hallus Rigidus, as it sounds, is big-toe arthritis from too much pivoting on the hoop court in youth! Some doctors use their terms without humor, and I search for a more clever one. So even the words we use from a start matter to you; oh, I see that after writing so many books, so many chapters, so many paragraphs.
When the topic warrants it, like in a Fable or a great short story, most experienced writers try for these trick beginnings, as they want to ease the joint pain of your reader comprehension and joy form the ground up!
They want you to pause, to take in each step, even go back, and start again.
2040: A Fable
My eighteenth book, a FABLE written from day one of Covid-19, is about to be released. 2040 has been beautifully designed by Frank Weaver of Aplomb Communications. It has been vigilantly edited by Peter Lynch, an editor of my last six books! They know to keep my wit as intended.
2040 — a mere 12 chapters long — starts with a wondrously tricky first chapter, where the characters are introduced — as they should be — but with twists and turns. You meet the protagonist, his wife, and his daughter, but also neighbors — who in dining, after years of “divine splendid isolation” due to a three year pandemic — turn out to be conspiratorialists.
This false start — from the green plump parrot in their house — to the couple’s return to the grand finale — are all deliberate. Step by step, the stress of the tale delights. I hope you enjoy it. The mistress muse of creativity suggested to me this tale, last March 5, when I had come back from Manhattan and a room full of three hundred investors, without Covid-19. In many ways, it is a clever celebration of survival, and a deep appreciation of my family, friends, and fancy. This Fable may fit your shoes better if you wear well-fit socks, my friends.
