Byzantine Blog
Probably the only vaguely interesting thing about me is that with my wife, Mary Reed, I co-author the John the Eunuch mystery series set in sixth century Constantinople. But that doesn't stop me from dwelling here on the boring minutiae of the rest of my life, present and past, along with the occasional word about writing.
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--Michel de Montaigne
An Audience of Walls
Maybe I'm showing my age. To me cyberspace is pretty much just space. Writing needs to be read. If digital words fall into cyberspace and no one reads them does it amount to writing?
Doesn't seem like it.
It isn't response that is necessary but knowing there's an audience to aim at. How do you know what to write if you don't know who will be reading? In my experience people who have no other audience in mind write for themselves and why should I want to reread what I've just composed?
If I'm writing for myself, I know my audience is going to be bored.
As my efforts to proofread my own stuff prove.
Shaping words that can be understood by someone else. That's the interesting challenge. Never mind the expressing of the Self and the baring of the Soul. Constructing a sentence intelligible to another mind is hard enough.
Is there an echo in here?
Reminds me of an epigram from J. W. Mackail's Greek Anthology , by an unknown, ancient Greek author.
"All hail, seven pupils of Aristides the rhetorician, four walls and three benches."
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