Walking in the room I see
Things that mean a lot to me
Why they do I'll never know
[NOTE: Today's 2 or 3 lines features the part four of our groundbreaking interview with . . . 2 or 3 lines! Just click here if you missed part three.]
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Q: The prolific novelist Joyce Carol Oates once wrote, “I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.” She has also said, “I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I’ve written.” How much time do you spend revising 2 or 3 lines posts?
A: One reason I force myself to post at least twice a week is to force myself to stop revising and move on. It’s tempting to revise, and revise some more, and keep revising – but sometimes less is more when it comes to revising. At some point, you have to stop revising and post the damn thing and move on to the next one.
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A: I throw everything into my first drafts – I just keep writing until I can’t think of anything more to say. For me, the process of revising is mostly deleting stuff. The more time I spend on a post, the shorter it gets – and shorter is almost always better. But there comes a point of diminishing returns when it comes to editing something I’ve written – the writing becomes less spontaneous and more labored. If I’m finding it hard to stop revising a post, that usually means there’s something seriously wrong with it. My best posts are those that were easy to write and required relatively little editing.
Q: Here’s another Joyce Carol Oates quote: “Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.” Do you agree?
A: Yes. As Oates noted, you have privacy, autonomy, and freedom when you’re alone. But it’s easy to become bored when you’re alone. Working on 2 or 3 lines is one of the ways I keep myself from getting bored. It’s also one of the ways I distract myself from feeling lonely. I usually don’t mind being alone – which is fortunate, since I think I spend much more time alone than most people. But sometimes I do mind.
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2 or 3 lines: Here’s one more Oates quote: “One of the qualities of writing that is not much stressed is its problem-solving aspect, having to do with the presentation of material: how to structure it, what sort of sentences (direct, elliptical, simple or compound, syntactically elaborate), what tone (in art, "tone" is everything), pacing. Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences.” Any thoughts on that?
2 or 3 lines: She’s absolutely correct when she says that paragraphing is important. Nothing annoys me more than paragraphs that are too long – I find it almost impossible to read a book with long paragraphs. The blog format I use has a much narrower space for text than a typical webpage does, so my paragraphs can look very long unless I keep them very short. But I would keep my paragraphs very short regardless. Paragraphing is not the only aspect of the look of 2 or 3 lines that I worry about, of course. I worry about every aspect of the graphic design of my blog – including what font to use, what photos to use and where to put them . . . all that is important.
Q: You’re not worried that you’re elevating form over substance?
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A: Form is just as important as substance. The presentation influences how the reader perceives content. If I’ve learned one thing about great pop music in the ten years I’ve been writing 2 or 3 lines, it’s that the arrangement of a recorded song is just as important as the words and music. The same is true of 2 or 3 lines – how I present what I write is just as important as the words themselves.
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Q: I’ve noticed that the posts from the blog’s first year or two do look different than more recent ones.
A: I’m truly appalled by how amateurish some of my early posts look – so appalled, in fact, that I often won’t share one of them with a friend or potential interview subject until I’ve gone back and cleaned it up. In fact, one of my long-term goals is to clean them all up – I want every post on the blog to have a consistent and professional look.
Q: Give us some examples of the specific changes you’ve made over the years to clean up the appearance of 2 or 3 lines posts.
A: When I started writing 2 or 3 lines, I used the 16-point Georgia font. But I eventually switched to 18-point Georgia for the body of the posts and 20-point Georgia for the two or three lines of song lyrics at the beginning of each post. Not only does that make the blog easier to read, it also encourages me to shorten my paragraphs further – the larger font makes them look longer. Also, I’ve stopped embedding Youtube videos of the featured songs a couple of years ago – now I use “click here” links for those songs. And I used to make a dash by hitting the hyphen key twice. But then I learned about en dashes, which I prefer to em dashes because you can make an en dash on a Mac by pressing two keys, while an em dash requires you to hit three keys. I also put a space before and after my en dashes.
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| (The official font of 2 or 3 lines) |
A: [Pause.] You don’t expect me to believe you actually “noticed” that, do you? Someone told you about that – probably hoping that you would ask me about it and get me all riled up.
Q: No comment.
A: There’s a good reason that I have both straight and curly quotation marks in 2 or 3 lines. I’m not going to go back and change the straight ones to curly ones, or vice versa – which would require me to do a lot of cutting and pasting. I may be obsessive, but I’m not that obsessive. But you can be assured that each individual post will contain only straight or curly quotes. I won’t have both types in a single post.
Q: Well, that’s relief! [Laughs.]
A: There’s one other change I’ve made to 2 or 3 lines in recent years. I now use five spaced asterisks – centered, not left-aligned – to indicate a change in topic. Like this:
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Q: I’ve noticed these in your recent posts, but haven’t given much thought to them.
A: I have.
Q: Obviously.
A: Those five centered asterisks perform two functions. First, they break up long posts – make them easier on the eye. Second, they free me up as a writer.
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A: Let’s say I write an uninterrupted 20-paragraph post. Each paragraph needs to be logically connected to the next, which isn’t easy to do – if you want to change the subject within a post, you have to come up with some kind of transition. It’s very constraining and limits your choices as a writer. But those five little asterisks create a clean break between what comes before and what comes after. I can switch topics without worrying about transitioning from one to the other – the asterisks take care of the transition. It’s like abrupt cutting in a movie – you can jump from place to place as you like. I might have a thought or an anecdote that takes only a few paragraphs to communicate – I can just drop it in without worrying about formally connecting it to what comes before and after.
Q: Who would have thought that five asterisks could make such a difference?
A: Believe me, that device makes a huge difference for me as a writer. It’s impossible for me to overstate how significant a discovery that was for me.
Q: More significant than using en dashes instead of em dashes?
A: I know you’re being sarcastic, but I couldn’t care less. In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve been writing a wildly successful little blog for TEN YEARS, so I might know a thing or two.
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2 or 3 lines: Speaking of ten years, today’s featured song is titled “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” Not to be a nitpicker, but there should be an apostrophe after “years,” which is possessive – “Happenings Ten Years’ Time Ago.”
2 or 3 lines: I noticed that as well. I thought about just adding that apostrophe without telling anyone, but that would have been wrong.
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A: It was a top 40 hit, but I don’t remember hearing it when it was new.
Q: You’re celebrating the tenth anniversary of 2 or 3 lines, so I’m not surprised that you chose to feature a song with “ten years” in the title. Did you find it by doing a Google search for songs with that phrase in the lyrics?
A: There you go assuming too much again. No, I didn’t do a Google search for “ten years” songs – I was randomly flipping around Sirius/XM channels in my car earlier today and came across this song. One of the reasons I picked it was that it had “ten years” in the title, but there were other reasons as well.
Q: Such as . . . ?
A: For one thing, it’s a great song – I think it’s as good as any Yardbirds song, which is saying something. For another, serendipity is a recurring theme on 2 or 3 lines – that’s the way I’ve discovered a lot of my favorite songs. Call it luck, or coincidence, or kismet, or “God’s way of remaining anonymous” (in the words of Albert Einstein), but the fact remains that if I had turned off my radio two minutes earlier, I would have missed “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” It deserves to be featured today for that reason alone.
Click here to listen to “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.”
And click below to buy the song from Amazon:
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