(no subject)

[andrewducker]

It's amazing how easily I get distracted. While waiting for the mainframe to catch up with me, I've been writing up a brief explanation of how the stock-market works (or not).

I've been using the comics market as an analogy, partially because it behaves in a similar way and partially because it's easier to understand.

So I started writing out a description of the comics boom/bust of the early 90s, only to find (when I came back from lunch) that I had digressed significantly from my original plan and was attempting to explain things at that level rather than leaving it to later.

I'm convinced that when I'm writing I'm not actually consciously thinking.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'd be very interested in seeing this explanation when you are done with it.

Wrt writing, I think that's one of the things about being a professional writer (or at least a pro who does not write fiction - at least half of the skilled fiction writers I've talked to say that writing is for them is at least partly an unconscious process). Writers of creative non-fiction and any sort of technical writing (which pretty much defines a range that extends my sort of work, to standard journalism, to John McPhee's wonderful essays) must learn to write consciously. That any being able to compose at the keyboard are skills that I find most commonly in people who write for a living (although I expect composing at the keyboard to become more common as writing things be hand becomes an increasingly marginal skill).